University of California Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Weste-n Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Series
J. David Lowell
USING APPLIED GEOLOGY TO DISCOVER LARGE
COPPER AND GOLD MINES IN ARIZONA, CHILE, AND PERU
With an Introduction by
John M. Guilbert
Interviews conducted by
Eleanor Swent
in 1998
Copyright 1999 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.
**************************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and J. David
Lowell dated September 15, 1998. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with J. David Lowell require that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
J. David Lowell, "Using Applied Geology to
Discover Large Copper and Gold Mines in
Arizona, Chile, and Peru," an oral history
conducted in 1998 by Eleanor Swent,
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California,
Berkeley, 1999.
Copy no.
David Lowell, 1998.
Cataloguing information
Lowell, J. David (b. 1928) Geologist
Using Applied Geology to Discover Large Copper and Gold Mines in Arizona,
Chile, and Peru. 1999, xx, 283 pp.
Lowell, Currier pioneer families in Arizona; working in father s mines
during Depression years; Arizona School of Mines, 1945-1949; mine engineer
for ASARCO, 1949-1951; geologist, AEC, 1951-1954; a year at Stanford
University; exploration geologist, Ranwick, Southwest Ventures, Utah
Construction, 1955-1959; independent consultant from 1960, associated with
major mine discoveries: Kalamazoo extension, Vekol Hills, Casa Grande West,
AZ ; Escondida, Zaldivar, San Cristobal, Leonor, Chile; Los Pinos, Los
Calatos, Paron, La Pierina, Peru; discusses developing theory of concentric
zoning of porphyry copper deposits, alliances with international mining
companies, problems in business in Latin America, negotiations with Barrick
for sale of La Pierina.
Introduction by John Guilbert, Professor Emeritus of Economic
Geology, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Interviewed in 1998 by Eleanor Swent for the Western Mining in the
Twentieth Century Oral History Series. The Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
TABLE OF CONTENTS --David Lowell
PREFACE i
INTRODUCTION by John M. Guilbert xiii
INTERVIEW HISTORY by Eleanor Swent xvii
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xx
I GUMMING, CURRIER, LOWELL FAMILIES 1
Growing Up in Arizona from 1928 1
Father, Arthur Currier Lowell 2
Mother, Lavina Gumming Lowell 3
The Lowell and Currier Families 3
The Gumming Family 4
Grandfather Douglas Wallace Gumming, a Wild West Adventurer 4
Parents Marriage and Life in Peru 8
II CHILDHOOD IN ARIZONA DURING THE DEPRESSION 10
Growing up in the Shadow of an Older Brother 10
Mother s Teaching at Palo Parado School 11
Helping at Father s Mine from the Age of Seven 13
III ARIZONA SCHOOL OF MINES, 1945 TO 1949 16
Playing Football and a Warning from Dean Chapman 16
Wife Edith Walmisley Sykes 19
1946 Summer Job at Idarado, "A Real Roughneck Mine" 20
Collecting Mineral Specimens in Mexico, 1947 23
Los Lamentos Mine, Chihuahua 24
Aguas Calientes Mine, Chihuahua, Summer of 1948 26
Life as a Married Student 33
IV MINE ENGINEER FOR ASARCO IN MEXICO, 1949 TO 1951 35
Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua 35
Shift Boss, Mine Foreman, the Buena Tierra Mine 36
A Close Call with Bad Air 36
Social Life 38
Recollections of Pancho Villa in Chihuahua 40
Housing 41
Asarco, a Tight Company 41
Lessons Learned: Supervision, Record Keeping, Mine Surveying 44
V GEOLOGIST FOR THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION, 1951 TO 1954 46
Manager of Cove School Drilling Camp, Arizona 46
District Manager, Holbrook, Arizona 49
Study of Mapping Fossil Stream Direction 51
Edith Lowell s Help in Editing 53
VI GRADUATE STUDY AT STANFORD, 1954 TO 1955 54
Shifting from Mining Engineering to Geology a Problem 5A
Paleontology Professor Simon Wilhelm Muller 55
VII EXPLORATION GEOLOGIST FOR RANWICK, SOUTHWEST VENTURES, UTAH
CONSTRUCTION, 1955 TO 1959 59
Manager, Menlove-Dalton Uranium Mine, Colorado 59
Vice President, Southwest Ventures, Inc. 62
Self-Education in Porphyry Copper Geology 65
Senior Geologist, Utah Construction Company, 1959 65
VIII LOCATING THE KALAMAZOO ORE BODY IN ARIZONA 69
Becoming an Independent Consultant, 1961 69
Consultant on Porphyry Copper for Newmont 71
Geology of the San Manuel Mine, Arizona 73
Quintana Petroleum Company 76
Martha Pursell s Unlucky Drilling Program 77
Disputed Ownership of the Kalamazoo Claim 78
Re-examining the Maps and Re-logging the Drill Samples 79
"Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel" 81
IX BUILDING A WORLD-WIDE REPUTATION 86
A Scam Uranium Deposit in the Dominican Republic 86
Testing AFMAG Geophysical Method by Helicopter 89
Another Helicopter Accident, in Peru 90
The Crash of a Utah Construction Company Plane 90
Engineer of Geology Degree, University of Arizona, 1959 91
Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad de San Marcos, Peru, 1998 92
Giving a Speech in Elegant Spanish about a Virtual University 93
Special Security Provisions Necessary 94
John Guilbert, Consultant on Theoretical Aspects of Kalamazoo
Geology 95
A Benchmark Paper on Concentric Zoning in Copper Deposits 96
Associate Editor of Economic Geology 97
Thayer Lindsley Lecturer for Society of Economic Geologists 97
Canadian Mining and Metallurgical Society Distinguished Lecturer 98
Building a Reputation: Knowledge More Important than Advertising 99
The Importance of Mapping the Mullion Structure and Concentric
Zones 101
The Vekol Hills Project, Southern Arizona 101
Copper Versus Saguaro Fruit 104
Kalamazoo Sold to Magma; Relations with Newmont 105
X DOING HALF-TIME CONTRACT EXPLORATION 107
A Unique Career Formula in the Industry 107
Mineral Exploration: Drilling, Land Acquisition Important Too 108
The Advantage of a Small Organization 109
The Covered Area Project; Casa Grande West, Arizona 110
Negative Effects of the Environmental Movement 115
A Project for Kaiser Aluminum in Argentina, 1969 117
Wild Experiences in Reconnaissance Flying 120
Drawbacks of Mineral Exploration in Argentina 121
Corruption and Doing Business in the "Third World" 122
A Number of Little Problems in Peru 122
Chile Was a Very Straight Place, But Has Deteriorated 12A
Geographical Variations in Corruption in Chile 125
Looking for Bargains in the Mining Industry 126
Expert Witness for the Arizona Highway Department 127
A Frightening Accident in an Arizona Mine 128
Mules, Grizzly Bears, and Elephants 129
Adventures in the Philippines 133
Hobbies: Spear Fishing and Skin Diving 136
Owning and Piloting Airplanes for Geological Reconnaissance 137
Helping with Two Ore Discoveries in the Philippines 139
The "Godfather" of Lepanto s Far Southeast Ore Body 1AO
Finding the JA Ore Body, British Columbia 1A1
Ore Deposits Consultant for Codelco, 1974-1980 142
XI THE ATACAMA PROJECT AND ESCONDIDA MINE, CHILE 144
Launching an Exploration Program with Utah International, 1978 144
The Atacama Project 145
The Success of Harris Drilling Company 145
Helicopter Program for Sampling Didn t Work Well 146
Tyler Kittredge Meets the Sampling Challenge 147
Escondida Mine 149
Filing the Claim and Mensura Survey with Unseemly Haste 153
The Drilling Project: Nine Holes Showed a 250-Million-Ton Reserve 154
The Zaldivar Mine 156
Mistakes Made by Minera Utah 157
Another Example of "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish" 159
XII SAN CRISTOBAL AND LEONOR MINES, CHILE 161
Compania Minera del Inca 161
San Cristobal Mine 162
Some Unsuccessful Exploration Projects 165
The Leonor Claim, a Property Problem 165
XIII ACUARIOS MINERA, AREQUIPA RESOURCES, AND LA PIERINA MINE, PERU 169
Investigation of Porphyry Copper in Southern Peru, 1985 169
Visa and Permit Considerations in Chile and Peru 170
Library Mining Research in Peru 171
Exploration in Southern Peru, Beginning in 1991 172
Los Pinos Prospect 174
Forming Acuarios Minera 175
Catherine McLeod and Arequipa Resources 175
An Unknown Partner 176
Los Calatos Deposit 177
Research and Reconnaissance for Gold in Northern Peru 179
Countering Terrorism 179
Paron Gold Deposit 182
Helicopter Sampling 184
The Pierina Claim 185
Pat Hillard, Geologist 185
Fredy Huanqui and an Alternate Version of the Discovery 186
Pit Samples Averaged Seven Grams of Gold 187
A Revolutionary Drilling Program on Wide Spacing 188
Lack of Geologic Mapping a Problem 189
Corporate Organization of Arequipa Resources 190
Catherine McLeod, a Very Competent Manager 190
The Difference Between Operating in Canada and Latin America 190
Informing Prospective Investors 192
Barrick Launches a "Hostile" Takeover 195
Deciding to Advise the Shareholders Not to Tender Their Shares 195
Placer Dome Nearly Gets in the Act 196
Consummating a Billion-Dollar Deal 198
Aftermath of a Windfall Fortune 201
XIV INDEPENDENT PROJECTS, FAMILY, ATASCOSA RANCH 202
Strategic Alliance with Rio Tinto 202
Exercising to Relieve Stress and Stay in Condition 204
Marriage and Family 204
Edith 205
Daughter Susan 206
Granddaughters Anna and Mary 207
Son Bill 207
Son Doug 208
Marcia Racine 209
A Pragmatic Philosophy of Mineral Exploration 209
Travels to China 212
Other Travels in Asia and the South Pacific 213
Ok Tedi Mine 213
Skin Diving in Truk Lagoon 215
Frisco Mines 215
Comparing Mexico and Chile 216
A Negative Experience in Nigeria 218
Collecting Mine Lamps 219
Atascosa Ranch 220
TAPE GUIDE 223
APPENDIX
"On the Roof of the World," Santa Cruz Surf, July 18, 1918 224
Resume, J. David Lowell 226
"Copper Resources in 1970," The 1970 Jackling Award Lecture,
Mining Engineering. April 1970 231
J. David Lowell, MMSA Biography, October 1998 238
American Mining Hall of Fame 1994 Medal of Merit Recipient
J. David Lowell, from Twelfth Annual Awards Presentation,
December 3, 1994 239
"Palabras del Serior James David Lowell en la Ceremonia de su
Doctorado Honoris Causa por la Universidad Nacional Mayor
de San Marcos," Lima, 14 de Agosto de 1998 [with English
translation following] 240
"Thrill Seeker," Canadian Business, October 1996 257
MMSA Gold Medal Candidate Information 264
"Pierina: a billion dollar mountain," The Southern Miner,
Fall 1996 270
Cartoon from The Northern Miner, [n.d.] 272
"Barrick Gold Plans to Make Offer Of $669.5 Million to Buy
Arequipa," Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1996 273
"Golden girl," London Financial Times, July 12, 1996 274
"Arequipa sale nets founder C$87m," Financial Times. August
19, 1996 275
INDEX 276
PREFACE
The oral history series on Western Mining in the Twentieth Century
documents the lives of leaders in mining, metallurgy, geology, education
in the earth and materials sciences, mining law, and the pertinent
government bodies. The field includes metal, non-metal, and industrial
minerals. In its tenth year the series numbers thirty-five volumes
completed and others in process.
Mining has changed greatly in this century: in the technology and
technical education; in the organization of corporations; in the
perception of the national strategic importance of minerals; in the labor
movement; and in consideration of health and environmental effects of
mining.
The idea of an oral history series to document these developments in
twentieth century mining had been on the drawing board of the Regional
Oral History Office for more than twenty years. The project finally got
underway on January 25, 1986, when Mrs. Willa Baum, Mr. and Mrs. Philip
Bradley, Professor and Mrs. Douglas Fuerstenau, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford
Heimbucher, Mrs. Donald McLaughlin, and Mr. and Mrs. Langan Swent met at
the Swent home to plan the project, and Professor Fuerstenau agreed to
serve as Principal Investigator.
An advisory committee was selected which included representatives
from the materials science and mineral engineering faculty and a
professor of history of science at the University of California at
Berkeley; a professor emeritus of history from the California Institute
of Technology; and executives of mining companies. Langan Swent
delighted in referring to himself as "technical advisor" to the series.
He abetted the project from the beginning, directly with his wise counsel
and store of information, and indirectly by his patience as the oral
histories took more and more of his wife s time and attention. He
completed the review of his own oral history transcript when he was in
the hospital just before his death in 1992. As some of the original
advisors have died, others have been added to help in selecting
interviewees, suggesting research topics, and securing funds.
The project was presented to the San Francisco section of the
American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers
(AIME) on "Old-timers Night," March 10, 1986, when Philip Read Bradley,
Jr., was the speaker. This section and the Southern California section
of AIME provided initial funding and organizational sponsorship.
The Northern and Southern California sections of the Woman s
Auxiliary to the AIME (WAAIME) , the California Mining Association, and
the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America (MMSA) were early
supporters. Later the National Mining Association became a sponsor. The
ii
project was significantly advanced by a generous bequest received in
November 1997 upon the death of J. Ward Downey, UC Berkeley alumnus and
early member of the mining series advisory committee. His own oral
history was completed in 1992. Other individual and corporate donors are
listed in the volumes. Sponsors to date include nineteen corporations,
four foundations, and 113 individuals. The project is ongoing, and funds
continue to be sought.
The first five interviewees were all born in 1904 or earlier.
Horace Albright, mining lawyer and president of United States Potash
Company, was ninety-six years old when interviewed. Although brief, this
interview adds another dimension to a man known primarily as a
conservationist .
James Boyd was director of the industry division of the military
government of Germany after World War II, director of the U.S. Bureau of
Mines, dean of the Colorado School of Mines, vice president of Kennecott
Copper Corporation, president of Copper Range, and executive director of
the National Commission on Materials Policy. He had reviewed the
transcript of his lengthy oral history just before his death in November,
1987. In 1990, he was inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame,
Leadville, Colorado.
Philip Bradley, Jr., mining engineer, was a member of the California
Mining Board for thirty-two years, most of them as chairman. He also
founded the parent organization of the California Mining Association, as
well as the Western Governors Mining Advisory Council. His uncle,
Frederick Worthen Bradley, who figures in the oral history, was in the
first group inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame in 1988.
Frank McQuiston, metallurgist for the Raw Materials Division of the
Atomic Energy Commission and vice president of Newmont Mining
Corporation, died before his oral history was complete; thirteen hours of
taped interviews with him were supplemented by three hours with his
friend and associate, Robert Shoemaker.
Gordon Oakeshott, geologist, was president of the National
Association of Geology Teachers and chief of the California Division of
Mines and Geology.
These oral histories establish the framework for the series;
subsequent oral histories amplify the basic themes. After over thirty
individual biographical oral histories were completed, a community oral
history was undertaken, documenting the development of the Mclaughlin
gold mine in the Napa, Yolo, and Lake Counties of California (the
historic Knoxville mercury mining district), and the resulting changes in
the surrounding communities. This comprises forty-three interviews.
iii
Future researchers will turn to these oral histories to learn how
decisions were made which led to changes in mining engineering education,
corporate structures, and technology, as well as public policy regarding
minerals. In addition, the interviews stimulate the deposit, by
interviewees and others, of a number of documents, photographs, memoirs,
and other materials related to twentieth century mining in the West.
This collection is being added to The Bancroft Library s extensive
holdings. A list of completed and in process interviews for the mining
series appears at the end of this volume.
The Regional Oral History Office is under the direction of Willa
Baum, division head, and under the administrative direction of The
Bancroft Library.
Interviews were conducted by Malca Chall and Eleanor Swent.
Willa K. Baum, Division Head
Regional Oral History Office
Eleanor Swent, Project Director
Western Mining in the Twentieth
Century Series
January 1998
Regional Oral History Office
University of California, Berkeley
iv
Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Series
Interviews Completed, November 1999
Horace Albright, Mining Lawyer and Executive, U.S. Potash Company, U.S. Borax,
1933-1962, 1989
Samuel S. Arentz, Jr., Mining Engineer, Consultant, and Entrepreneur in Nevada
and Utah, 1934-1992, 1993
James Boyd, Minerals and Critical Materials Management: Military and
Government Administrator and Mining Executive, 1941-1987, 1988
Philip Read Bradley, Jr., A Mining Engineer in Alaska, Canada, the Western
United States, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, 1988
Catherine C. Campbell, Ian and Catherine Campbell, Geologists: Teaching,
Government Service, Editing, 1989
William Clark, Reporting on California s Gold Mines for the State Division of
Mines and Geology, 1951-1979, 1993
John Robert Clarkson, Building the Clarkson Company, Making Reagent Feeders
and Valves for the Mineral Industry, 1935 to 1998, 1999
Norman Cleaveland, Dredge Mining for Gold, Malaysian Tin, Diamonds, 1921-1966;
Exposing the 1883 Murder of William Raymond Morley, 1995
James T. Curry, Sr., Metallurgist for Empire Star Mine and Newmont
Exploration, 1932-1955; Plant Manager for Calaveras Cement Company,
1956-1975, 1990
Donald Dickey, The Oriental Mine, 1938-1991, 1996
J. Ward Downey, Mining and Construction Engineer, Industrial Management
Consultant, 1936 to the 1990s, 1992
Warren Fenzi, Junior Engineer to President, Director of Phelps Dodge, 1937 to
1984, 1996
Hedley S. "Pete" Fowler, Mining Engineer in the Americas, India, and Africa,
1933-1983, 1992
James Mack Gerstley, Executive, U.S. Borax & Chemical Corporation; Trustee,
Pomona College; Civic Leader, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, 1991
Robert M. Haldeman, Managing Copper Mines in Chile: Braden, CODELCO, Minerec,
Pudahuel; Developing Controlled Bacterial Leaching of Copper from
Sulfide Ores; 1941-1993, 1995
John F. Havard, Mining Engineer and Executive, 1935-1981, 1992
Wayne Hazen, Plutonium Technology Applied to Mineral Processing; Solvent
Extraction; Building Hazen Research; 1940-1993, 1995
George Heikes, Mining Geologist on Four Continents, 1924-1974, 1992
Helen R. Henshaw, Recollections of Life with Paul Henshaw: Latin America,
Homestake Mining Company, 1988
Homestake Mine Workers, Lead, South Dakota, 1929-1993, interviews with
Clarence Kravig, Wayne Harford, and Kenneth Kinghorn, 1995
Lewis L. Huelsdonk, Manager of Gold and Chrome Mines, Spokesman for Gold
Mining, 1935-1974, 1988
William Humphrey, Mining Operations and Engineering Executive for Anaconda,
Newmont, Homestake, 1950 to 1995, 1996
James Jensen, Chemical and Metallurgical Process Engineer: Making Deuterium,
Extracting Salines and Base and Heavy Metals, 1938-1990s, 1993
Arthur I. Johnson, Mining and Metallurgical Engineer in the Black Hills:
Pegmatites and Rare Minerals, 1922 to the 1990s, 1990
G. Frank Joklik, Exploration Geologist, Developer of Mt. Newman, President and
CEO of Kennecott, 1949-1996; Chairman, Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter
Games Committee, 1997
Evan Just, Geologist: Engineering and Mining Journal, Marshall Plan, Cyprus
Mines Corporation, and Stanford University, 1922-1980, 1989
Robert Kendall, Mining Borax, Shaft-Freezing in Potash Mines, U.S. Borax,
Inc., 1954-1988, 1994
The Knoxville Mining District, The Mclaughlin Gold Mine, Northern California,
1978-1995, Volume I, 1998
Anderson, James, "Homestake Vice President-Exploration"
Baker, Will, "Citizen Activist, Yolo County"
Birdsey, Norman, "Metallurgical Technician, McLaughlin Process Plant"
Bledsoe, Brice, "Director, Solano Irrigation District"
vi
The Knoxville Mining District, The Mclaughlin Gold Mine, Northern California,
1978-1995, Volume II, 1998
Cerar, Anthony, "Mercury Miner, 1935-1995"
Ceteras, John, "Organic Farmer, Yolo County"
Conger, Harry, "President, Chairman, and CEO, Homestake Mining Company,
1977 to 1994"
Corley, John Jay, "Chairman, Napa County Planning Commission, 1981 to
1985"
Cornelison, William, "Superintendent of Schools, Lake County" (Includes
an interview with John A. Drummond, Lake County Schools Attorney)
The Knoxville Mining District, The Mclaughlin Gold Mine, Northern California,
1978-1995, Volume III, 1998
Crouch, David, "Homestake Corporate Manager-Environmental Affairs"
Enderlin, Elmer, "Miner in Fifty-Eight Mines"
Fuller, Claire, "Fuller s Superette Market, Lower Lake"
Goldstein, Dennis, "Homestake Corporate Lawyer"
Guinivere, Rex, "Homestake Vice President-Engineering"
The Knoxville Mining District, The Mclaughlin Gold Mine, Northern California,
1978-1995, Volume IV, 1998
Gustafson, Donald, "Homestake Exploration Geologist, 1975-1990"
Hanchett, Bonny Jean, "Owner and Editor, Clearlake Observer. 1955-1986"
Hickey, James, "Director of Conservation, Development, and Planning for
Napa County, 1970 to 1990"
Jago, Irene, "The Jagos of Jago Bay, Clear Lake"
Jonas, James, "Lake County Fuel Distributor"
Koontz, Dolora, "Environmental Engineer, McLaughlin Mine, 1988-1995"
The Knoxville Mining District, The Mclaughlin Gold Mine, Northern California,
1978-1997, Volume V, 1998
Kritikos, William, "Operator, Oat Hill Mine"
Landman, John, "Rancher, Morgan Valley"
Lyons, Roberta, "Journalist and Environmentalist"
Madsen, Roger, "Homestake Mechanical Engineer"
Magoon, Beverly, "Merchant and Craft Instructor, Lower Lake"
McGinnis, Edward, "Worker at the Reed Mine"
Marian Lane, Mine Doctor s Wife in Mexico During the 1920s, 1996
J. David Lowell, Using Applied Geology to Discover Large Copper and Gold Mines
in Arizona, Chile, and Peru, 1999
Plato Malozemoff, A Life in Mining: Siberia to Chairman of Newmont Mining
Corporation, 1909-1985, 1990
James and Malcolm McPherson, Brothers in Mining, 1992
Frank Woods McQuiston, Jr., Metallurgist for Newmont Mining Corporation and
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1934-1982, 1989
vii
Gordon B. Oakeshott, The California Division of Mines and Geology, 1948-1974,
1988
James H. Orr, An Entrepreneur in Mining in North and South America, 1930s to
1990s, 1995
Vincent D. Perry, A Half Century as Mining and Exploration Geologist with the
Anaconda Company, 1991
Patrick Purtell, Maintenance and Management at the Mclaughlin Mine, 1985 to
1997, 1999
Carl Randolph, Research Manager to President, U.S. Borax & Chemical
Corporation, 1957-1986, 1992
John Reed, Pioneer in Applied Rock Mechanics, Braden Mine, Chile, 1944-1950;
St. Joseph Lead Company, 1955-1960; Colorado School of Mines, 1960-1972,
1993
Joseph Rosenblatt, EIMCO, Pioneer in Underground Mining Machinery and Process
Equipment, 1926-1963, 1992
Eugene David Smith, Working on the Twenty-Mule Team: Laborer to Vice
President, U.S. Borax & Chemical Corporation, 1941-1989, 1993
Simon Strauss, Market Analyst for Non-ferrous Metals and Non-metallic
Minerals, Journalist, Mining Corporation Executive, 1927-1994, 1995
Langan W. Swent , Working for Safety and Health in Underground Mines: San Luis
and Homestake Mining Companies, 1946-1988, 1995
James V. Thompson, Mining and Metallurgical Engineer: the Philippine Islands;
Dorr, Humphreys, Kaiser Engineers Companies; 1940-1990s, 1992
William Wilder, Owner of One Shot Mining Company: Manhattan Mercury Mine,
1965-1981, 1996
viii
Interviews In Process
Frank Apian, metallurgist
Harry M. Conger, Kaiser, Homestake
Hugh Ingle, Jr., "Independent Small Mines Operator; The Corona Mine"
Raymond Krauss, "Environmental Manager, McLaughlin Mine"
John Livermore, geologist
Robert McKenzie, "Photographer and Local Historian, Napa County"
Harold Moskowite, "County Supervisor, Napa County"
Marion Onstad, "Morgan Valley Rancher, Homestake Secretary"
Ronald Parker, "General Manager, McLaughlin Mine, 1988- 1994"
Robert Shoemaker, metallurgist
Richard Stoehr, "Homestake Vice President and Director"
Joseph Strapko, "Homestake Field Geologist"
Jack Thompson, "General Manager, McLaughlin Mine, 1981-1988"
Twyla Thompson, "County Supervisor, Yolo County"
Avery Tindell, "Capay Valley Environmentalist"
John Turney, "McLaughlin Metallurgist: Pioneering Autoclaving for Gold"
Delia Underwood, "Knoxville Rancher, McLaughlin Mine Surveyor"
Walter Wilcox, "County Supervisor, Lake County"
Alexander Wilson, BHP-Utah Minerals
ix
ADVISORS TO THE SERIES, WESTERN MINING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Professor Douglas Fuerstenau, Principal Investigator
Plato Malozemoff Professor, Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
Robert R. Beebe, Senior Vice
President (retired), Horaestake
Mining Company
Mrs. Philip R. Bradley, Honorary
Life Member, WAAIME
Henry Colen, President, San
Francisco Mining Associates
Professor Richard Goodman,
Department of Civil Engineering,
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Roger Hahn, Department of
History, University of California,
Berkeley
Clifford Heimbucher, C.P.A.,
Consultant, Varian Associates, Inc.
Noel Kirshenbaum, Manager, Mineral
Products Development, Placer Dome
U.S.
Joseph P. Matoney, Vice President
(retired) Coal, Kaiser Engineers,
Inc.
Mrs. Donald H. Mclaughlin, Founder,
Save San Francisco Bay Association
Professor Malcolm McPherson, Massey
Professor of Mining Engineering,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University
Professor H. Frank Morrison,
Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley
Professor Joseph A. Pask, Department
of Materials Science and Mineral
Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley
* Advisors deceased during the
period of the project:
*Philip R. Bradley, Former Chairman,
California State Mining and Geology
Board
Professor Neville G. Cook,
Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley
*J. Ward Downey, Engineering and
Industrial Management Consultant
*John Havard, Senior Vice President
(retired), Kaiser Engineers, Inc.
*Plato Malozemoff, Chairman
Emeritus, Newmont Mining Corporation
*Professor Emeritus Charles Meyer,
Department of Geology, University of
California, Berkeley
*Professor Emeritus Rodman Paul,
Department of History, California
Institute of Technology
*Langan W. Swent , Vice President
(retired), Homestake Mining Company
The Regional Oral History Office
would like to express its thanks to the organizations
and individuals whose encouragement and support have made possible
The Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Series.
DONORS TO
THE WESTERN MINING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
ORAL HISTORY SERIES
1986-1999
Organizations
American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers,
San Francisco, Southern California, and Black Hills Sections
Woman s Auxiliary to the AIME, Southern California and Northern California
Bechtel Foundation
California Mining Association
The Cleveland-Cliffs Foundation
The Jackling Fund of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America
National Mining Association
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
Corporations
ASARCO
Bechtel Group Incorporated
BHP Minerals
Chemical Lime Company
The Clarkson Company
Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc.
Cyprus Amax Minerals Company
Dow Chemical Company
EIMCO Process Equipment Company
E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Co. , Inc.
Freeport-McMoRan
Hazen Research, Inc.
Hecla Mining Company
Homestake Mining Company
Kennecott Corporation
Krebs Engineers
Magma Copper Company
Newmont Mining Corporation
Pacific Gas & Electric Company
Phelps Dodge Corporation
United States Borax & Chemical Corporation
Wharf Resources, Limited
The J. Ward Downey Bequest Fund
xi
Patrons
Frank F. Apian
Charles and Lois Barber
Bechtal Foundation
James Boyd
Arthur C. Bradley
Catherine C. Campbell
Curtis Clarkson
J. Robert and Edna M. Clarkson
Norman Cleaveland
Rosemary and Harry M. Conger
Barbara H. and James T. Curry, Jr.
Donald Dickey
Wayne Dowdey
J. Ward and Alberta P. Downey
Mr. & Mrs. Warren Fenzi
Douglas and Margaret Fuerstenau
Launce E. Gamble
James M. Gerstley
Robert M. Haldeman
The Hearst Foundation, Inc.
Mrs. Paul C. Henshaw, in memory of
her husband, Paul C. Henshaw
William A. Humphrey
James H. Jensen
Arthur I. Johnson
G. Frank Joklik
Arthur H. Kinneberg
Mrs. Lois B. Lippincott
John S. Livermore
J. David Lowell
Dean A. McGee
Mrs. Frank W. McQuiston, Jr., in
memory of Frank W. McQuiston, Jr.
George B. Munroe
Gordon B. Oakeshott
Thomas and Margaret O Neil
Vincent D. Perry
Plato Malozemoff Foundation
Public Resource Foundation
Carl L. Randolph
Joseph Rosenblatt
Berne Schepman
Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Stoehr
Langan and Eleanor Swent
Milton Ward
Mr. and Mrs. Alexander M. Wilson
Individuals
Claude J. Artero
Rebecca Bender
Bruce A. Bolt
Clemence DeGraw Jandrey Boyd
James Brown Boyd, Harry Bruce Boyd,
Douglas Cane Boyd, and Hudson
Boyd in memory of James Boyd
Philip and Katherine Bradley
Albert T. Chandler
David J. Christie
William B. Clark
Mr. David Crouch
Nancy S. and James T. Curry, Sr.
Stanley Dempsey
Edward C. Dowling
Elisabeth L. Egenhoff
Christine Finney
H. S. Pete Fowler
Maurice and Joyce Fuerstenau
Louis R. Goldsmith
Donald L. Gustafson
Jayne K. Haldane
Kenneth N. Han
Guy H. Harris
Bonnie, Russell, and Steve Harford
James H. Hickey
Mason L. and Marie J. Hill
Gael Hodgkins
Sylvia Hochscheid, in memory of
Robert E. Hochscheid
Mrs. Bruce S. Howard, in memory of
Henry Harland Bradley
Lewis L. Huelsdonk
Ruth B. Hume
Howard Janin
Jack M. Jones
Alfred Juhl
Evan Just
Sheila Kelley
James C. Kimble
Kenneth Kinghorn
Noel W. Kirshenbaum
Nancy H. Landwehr
Carl F. Love
Plato Malozemoff
Sylvia C. McLaughlin
Sylvia C. McLaughlin, in memory of
Jay Kimpston Swent
Frances B. Messinger
L. Arthur Norman, Jr.
Patrick O Neill
K. Osseo-Asare
George F. Reed
John J. Reed
Richard W. Rees
Jane A. Rummel
xii
Simon D. Strauss
John R. Struthers
Virginia Bradley Sutherland, in
memory of Helen R. Henshaw
Jack Thompson
James V. Thompson
Twyla J. Thompson
John J. Trelavmey
William I. Watson
Barbara A. Whitton in memory of
William B. Whitton
William B. Whitton
Sheldon Wimpfen
Judy D. Woodward
Mr. and Mrs. E. W.
Fenelon F. Davis
In Memory of Catherine C. Campbell
Averill, Jr. Richard Friedlander
Richard M. Stewart
Marjorie D. Bjorlo
Christine W. S. Byrd
John and Dagmar Dern
Sylvia C. McLaughlin
In Memory of Langan W. Swent
Eleanor H. Swent
Jeannette F. Swent
Richard L. Swent
Regional Oral History Office Staff
Fenelon Davis
Lowell Dygert
Mary G. Freedman
Marilyn Glover
Virginia Goldsmith
Barbara Henderson
In Memory of William B. Clark
John Matschek
Hilda Schramm
George Shutes
Barbara Vollmer
Mary Witt
Mary Woods
In Memory of J. Ward Downey
Willa Baum
Douglas Fuerstenau
James Jensen
Eleanor H. Swent
In Memory of Phillip R. Bradley. Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. John P. Austin
Gail and Heath Angelo, Jr.
Earl Beistline
The Claremont Book Club
Judge and Mrs. John S. Cooper
Professor Emeritus Gregory Grossman
Marily and Thomas Johnson
Remington and Jean Low
Sylvia C. McLaughlin
Rubye C. Reade
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Shaw
Judge and Mrs . John Sparrow
Eleanor H. Swent
Dr. and Mrs. Edward E. Waller, Jr.
xiii
INTRODUCTION by John Guilbert
It could hardly be more fitting that J. David Lowell be selected
for inclusion in this series of oral histories to annotate and celebrate
Western Mining in the Twentieth Century. Not only has he personally
discovered more copper than any man in history; not only has he
discovered multi-billion-dollar gold and copper districts that have
changed the economies of countries; not only has he participated in
"rewriting the book" on several ore deposit geologic types; but also he
has done it "his way", innovatively , purposefully, and essentially
single-handedly. He has been the architect of his own life and success,
and has appropriately become a major figure in the world of minerals,
mining, and economic geology.
My first contact with Dave Lowell came in September, 1965. I had
arrived from Butte, Montana, to Tucson in August of that year to assume
a coveted position as Assistant Professor of Economic Geology in the
Geology Department at the University of Arizona. My graduate schooling
and my post with the Anaconda Company at Butte had inflamed my interest
in the then-ill-defined deposit type called "porphyry coppers", and I
was immediately upon arrival in Tucson asked to speak to the Arizona
Geological Society on the controversial concept that the Butte district
itself was a "porphyry copper"--indeed the porphyry-identity-crisis
controversy also swirled in Arizona, as it should have. In my talk, I
described research progress at the Butte Geologic Research Laboratory
that not only had devolved new symmetries and processes for the ore
deposits of the Butte camp, but also projected important ideas
concerning porphyry systems overall. After my talk--to a daunting
audience of 300 or so of Arizona s most capable economic geologists a
slight, somewhat diffident man approached the podium. He said, "I
enjoyed your talk, and I m drilling a prospect over on the other side of
the Santa Catalina Mountains that might have some similarities to what
you described at Butte. Would you care to look at a few thin sections
from it?" I was eager to get inserted into the Tucson ore deposits
scene, so I gladly accepted his invitation. The next day the sections
arrived, and after a cursory glance I reported excitedly by phone that I
could say nothing quantitative about his prospect but that the rocks in
these sections were qualitatively so similar to those at Butte and to
what I knew of other "porphyry coppers" in Chile, British Columbia, and
elsewhere that it looked to me as though he had hit one "spot on". The
man, of course, was J. David Lowell and the prospect was Kalamazoo, the
just-discovered "other half" of San Manuel and Dave s first major
geologic discovery triumph.
There began a long and productive friendship. I quickly discovered
in Dave an uncommon mix of the scientist and the practitionerit is
XIV
tempting to use the tern "corporate explorationist" but he was too
independent for the application of that label. He consulted for and
with companies in a corporate mode but always as his own man, the
engineer of his own train. He believed then, as he does now, that the
best vehicle of exploration is the free-lancer, the small outfit whose
leader can think freely, act swiftly, back away and move on when
necessary, and pursue inklings of success surely and intensely. But he
was far more than a prospector because he actively and imaginatively
consulted others, asked questions, marshaled facts, and created
knowledge as a scientist does when he needed to solve problems. For
example, as we chewed things over in his office early in our friendship,
we found that Butte and Kalamazoo shared geometries, chemistries, and
zonal characteristics that appeared to define a reasonable "porphyry
copper deposit model" for which other geologists and companies were
groping, so we decided to try to formulate that model by tabulating
relevant data from other ore bodies considered to be "porphyries". His
experience with scores of deposits and prospects and the analytical
thought processes that led him to design the Kalamazoo Project in the
early 1960s, and my more academic-process-oriented approach and
corporate experience, fulminated an exciting time while we fitted pieces
of the "porphyry puzzle" together in the late sixties. No one had heard
of Lowell (or Guilbert) when the first Geological Society of America
Penrose Conference was being formatted in Tucson in 1968--in fact, we
had to cajole our way onto the program. But the tabulation of porphyry
characteristics that we distributed there and our description of the
"typical" porphyry copper deposit were among the skyrockets of the
symposium. We learned much later that in subsequent years, after we
published our synthesis in 1970, four famous geologists were spotted at
different times in various parts of South America: namely, David Lowell,
John Guilbert, Lowell Guilbert, and Guilbert Lowell.
Lowell s "porphyry calling" was as surely toward field endeavor
leading to discovery as mine was into my university role of teaching and
research. His steps were sure. He could at many junctures have linked
up with companies in various capacities (and did so at least once), but
it is my perception that the closer he came to that involvement the less
happy he was. He had many strict personal, ethical, and tactical
policies and requirements of his colleagues, and many of the people with
whom he worked from time to time found them chafing. His was the path
of the individual, the individualist, the visionary who was always
trying to figure things out. That we collaborated many times during the
next decades--and still do--is consistent with his continued reaching
for new ideas and strategies. He was the practitioner who had no
patience with potential office politics, the one who was focused almost
totally on trying to read geologic field alteration-rock-mineral detail
into usable text for finding ore. It is worth noting here that most
field geologists spend their early years in the field, generally away
from family; but as the years go by they get "promoted" into offices and
greater corporate responsibility and gradually grow away from contact
XV
with field work and outcrops. David Lowell perennially spent many
months away from home, but managed either to take his family with him
(as to an apartment in Santiago) or to get home frequently enough.
Whatever it took, he has been able to live up to his own boot-leather-
and-rock-hammer credo that "you only make ore-deposit discoveries in the
field" even into his post-normal-retirement years. His modus operandi
was to take his ideas on exploration strategieshe was one of the great
interpolationists--to companies, to consortia, and to individuals and to
assemble an exploration team to pursue them. Throughout his career, he
has shown himself to be a remarkable manager of ideas, men, and
materiel, a paragon of discipline, self -discipline and perseverance, and
a man of great vision. The amazing degree of his success is obvious
from his discoveries list and the interview that follows.
As you absorb his success story, you will see unfold an almost
Horatio Alger-like story of growth from inauspicious but salutary
beginnings through a series of formative periods of professional
development, good education well received, applied learning on several
job sites in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, formulation of
exploration strategies, and the launching of his own enterprises and
exploration vehicles. What you may not see is the enormity of his
professional success as the discoverer of at least eight new porphyry
deposits, two of which vie for the largest-in-the-world title, one of
which (La Escondida) is a mainstay of Chile s (and BHP s) copper
profile. And he has controlled at various times at least two score of
important copper prospects, some of which (like Santa Cruz and Los
Calatos) may yet prove commercial. His breadth is proven by his also
having discovered two major gold mines, one of them (Pierina) having
produced a stock-market surge that made him and Arequipa Resources the
darlings of mining investors and created hundreds of millions of dollars
of wealth. Pierina also resulted in one of the lowest-cost major gold
mines in the world for its ultimate owner. His scientific drive is
manifest in his having doggedly pursued a leached capping texture
problem at what would be known as La Escondida; his correct discernment
of what would be called hypersaline "super-leaching" textures fueled his
conviction to continue the project to its amazing fruition. That drive
is also attested by the fact that although he dislikes writing, avoids
public appearances, and dreads giving talks, he owns a long and
distinguished list of technical-scientific papers, is a sought-after
instructor-lecturer, and has spoken to large and enthusiastic audiences
at symposia and conferences for thirty years.
You may not see in his interview the enormous respect that his
long-time friends have for him, and the fact that his "worldly success"
has affected his personal friendships not at all. His friendliness and
generosity of spirit are widely recognized. His eye still twinkles
merrily, he seldom fails to stay in touch with old chums, and he is in
strong demand as a speaker, writer, and short-course instructor. And
through all his success, he has remained his own man. I relish the
xv i
story that he was asked a few years ago to give an after-dinner talk to
a gathering in Tucson celebrating the retirement of the chief geologist
of a major multi-national company. Regional chief geologists, district
geologists, office managers, and scores of field staff had been
assembled. Dave s topic was "The Design of a Successful Exploration
Team". I was never told so, but I m sure that the assembled hierarchy
expected their own vast, far-flung, and highly structured group to get a
pat on the back... but Dave proceeded to point out that the small lone-
wolf free-lance exploration group had been demonstrably the most
successful exploration mode in this century!
As Lowell heads into his "retirement years", he is spending more
time at his beloved Atascosa Ranch near Tucson with Edith, seeing more
of his sons, his daughter, and a growing list of grandkids, and pursuing
old hobbies. For most men, gazing at the trophy wall (his Jackling
award, his medals, honorary degrees, and plaques) might suffice. For
most men, financial comfort might be a reason to relax. For most men,
having discovered Kalamazoo, Santa Cruz, La Escondida, and Pierina
(among others) would be enough. But Dave s head is slightly turned, his
eyes upward... his energies and enthusiasms will not subside .. .and he
still travels to Mexico, Peru, and Chile .. .still plotting, still
contemplating, still eager, still reaching out to find the next
orebody . . .
John M. Guilbert
Professor Emeritus of Economic Geology
Department of Geosciences
University of Arizona, Tucson
Tucson, Arizona
July 1999
XV11
INTERVIEW HISTORY- -J.. David Lowell
David Lowell, one of the premier mine-finders of his time, is an
important addition to the oral history series on Western Mining in the
Twentieth Century. His name was proposed early on by several advisors,
and arrangements for the interviews were facilitated by fellow
geologist Dooley P. Wheeler, Jr., a friend of the oral history project,
after a visit to our offices in April 1998. The letter of invitation to
participate in the project was sent to David Lowell in May 1998 and he
promptly accepted.
In June of 1998, the Mining History Association meeting in Bisbee,
Arizona, provided the opportunity for me to meet David Lowell at the
Tucson airport. We talked for some time there, getting acquainted and
planning for the interviews. Because some world-famous geologists are
also long-legged [e.b. John Gustafson, Ira Joralemon, John Livermore], I
had visualized him as very tall, but Lowell, like legendary mining
figures Plato Malozemoff, Donald McLaughlin, and Vincent Perry, is soft-
voiced and of average height. He was dressed then and subsequently in
traditional Arizona rancher attire: blue plaid short-sleeved shirt,
twill trousers, large silver belt buckle.
Within a few days, a packet arrived in the mail containing a
complete career outline, a list of publications, and a list of the
people who played significant roles in his life and work. Throughout
the oral history process, he acted with similar dispatch, corresponding
variously by telephone, letter, and email, and aiding every step to a
remarkable degree.
In September 1998, David Lowell and his wife Edith welcomed me to
their home, the Atascosa Ranch, at Rio Rico, south of Tucson. They
arranged for me to stay at the nearby Tubac Golf Club and lent me a
utility vehicle to drive back and forth to the ranch. On September 15,
16, and 17 we tape-recorded nearly fifteen hours of recollections of a
life which began seventy years before, only a few miles from where we
sat, and along the way had taken him to nearly every part of the world.
Despite the "fast-track" schedule, the interviews were relaxed and
informal, in the most pleasant of settings. At Atascosa, the Lowells
have made a few modern additions to a very old stone house at the head
of Peck Canyon, a valley where bright green "seep willows" line the
riverbed. The house is shaded by a pomegranate tree and enormous
hackberry trees; tire swings, one fashioned like a pony, hang from the
branches. In the kitchen, a large dog cushion takes up much of the
floor space. In the dining room is a large antique corner cupboard
handed down in Edith s family. There is much evidence of family warmth
xviii
and solidity here; the only overt sign of wealth and personal indulgence
is in the splendid master bath.
Edith Lowell and secretary/office manager Marcia Racine provide
support for the many enterprises conducted from these premises in the
office building adjacent to the house. Up-to-date equipment connects to
far-flung colleagues and telephone conversations are conducted in
Spanish as well as English. Well-worn bridles and chaps hang by the
bathroom door. Tall windows give beautiful views of the canyon and the
tile floors are softened by tribal oriental rugs. In the spacious,
high-ceilinged main office room, there are hundreds of books on shelves.
Indian baskets, mine lamps, framed citations, a mountain lion pelt,
carefully labeled mineral specimens, and a gold Inca replica memento are
among the decorations. The desk is at one side of the room; we sat at a
large table. Rolled maps which must usually occupy the table are now in
boxes on the floor. We hear dogs barking, horses whinnying; once or
twice birds twitter so loudly they nearly drown out our voices.
Although he belongs to one of America s most distinguished
families, David Lowell was not born to luxury. His career began with
hard work as a little boy during the Depression, hand-sorting ore for
his father at a mine not far from the ranch. The death of his older
brother during World War II was a harsh formative event. He worked hard
through all of his school and college years, encouraged by Dean Thomas
Chapman at the University of Arizona and by Edith Walmisley, whom he
married during his junior year, when he was twenty years old. He has
also found time for sports and hobbies, some rather daring, such as
piloting his own plane and skin diving.
In his oral history, he recalls some major decisions: not to
continue graduate school at Stanford, not to go into teaching, not to
continue with the USGS [United States Geological Survey], and finally,
not to stay with the security of working for Utah Construction and
Mining Company, but to risk going out on his own to hunt for mines. He
tells how he developed his formula for contract exploration to locate
mines in partnership with major corporations, to the benefit of both.
It has been an enormously successful enterprise, and even though we know
the outcome, it is exciting to hear him tell how he risked his financial
security and often times his life as well, over-flying the Andes in the
search for new mines.
Finding the Kalamazoo extension of the San Manuel ore body in
Arizona was his first great success, and illustrates his contention that
acquiring the land and negotiating with people is just as important as
knowing the geology. The Vekol Hills project never came to fruition
because of decisions that were made apart from the geology. The Casa
Grande West Mine did not fulfill its geologic potential because of other
considerations. La Escondida, one of the world s greatest copper mines,
in Chile, and the fabulous Pierina gold mine, in Peru, have led him to
XIX
fame and riches. In the latter case, the board-room drama caused by a
subsequent "hostile takeover" offer seems to have been as exciting as
the original discovery in the high Andes.
During the course of completing the oral history, honors have
continued to accrue for Lowell: membership in the National Academy of
Engineering; first Robert M. Dreyer Award of the SHE [Society for
Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration); Robert E. McConnell Award of the
AIME [American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum
Engineers]; International Exchange Lecturer for the Society of Economic
Geologists in the year 2000.
The tapes of the interview were transcribed in the Regional Oral
History Office, lightly edited, and sent to David Lowell for review in
November 1998. He made several minor clarifications of diction and
spelling, and a number of additions, which are indicated in the text.
He returned the transcript promptly, early in January 1999. He also
sent an assortment of good-quality photographs, meticulously dated and
labeled, from which we chose those included in the volumes. The
manuscript was corrected, amended, and indexed at our office. The tapes
are deposited in The Bancroft Library and are available for study.
The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to record
the lives of persons who have contributed significantly to the history
of California and the West. The office is a division of The Bancroft
Library and is under the direction of Willa K. Baum.
Eleanor Swent
Project Director, Research Interviewer/Editor
September 1999
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
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SIGNATURE DATE =
April 20, 20CX5
I GUMMING, CURRIER, LOWELL FAMILIES
[Interview 1: September 15, 1998] ////
Growing Up in Arizona from 1928
Swent: We re beginning Interview 1, and we re sitting in your very
beautiful office out on your Atascosa Ranch near Rio Rico,
Arizona. We re going to be talking about all the things that
brought us to where you are today. Let s begin at the beginning.
Lowell: Well, I was born not far from here on a small ranch north of
Nogales, Arizona. My date of birth was February 28, 1928. I was
born at home, instead of being born in a hospital in a town. The
reason that this happened was that my brother and sister were both
very sick at the time, and the doctor, whose name was Dr. Smelker,
was not sure of the cause of the illness and he felt it was
probably contagious. He was right because it turned out, years
later, that my brother and sister had had polio at that time.
Swent: Were they disabled from it?
Lowell: No, not really. My sister had a few kind of vague effects of it
and as far as I know there were none in the case of ray brother.
Swent : What made them think they had polio?
Lowell: That I don t know. This comes largely from my sister. A first
cousin also was sick at the same time, and he did develop some
physical disability, but even in his case it was relatively mild.
In any case, a nurse was hired, whose name was Mrs. Brown, who
took care of my mother. My sister s comments on this was that
Mrs. Brown tolerated my brother and sister as pests but didn t
worry about it.
## This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.
My brother was five years older than I, and my sister, nine
years older. My brother was a second lieutenant in the Marine
Corps and was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Second World
War.
Swent : What was his name?
Lowell: His name was Hervey William Lowell. My sister s name was--is--
Margaret Lowell Grade. Her married name was Grade. She s now a
widow. She was also in the service in the Second World War and
was the first WAVE [Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency
Service] Navy officer from Arizona. I grew up in Santa Cruz
County for the first seven years of my life. The 1928 birthdate
obviously coincided with the Great Depression; one of the
fundamental conditions of my childhood was poverty. My family had
been in good shape until about 1930, but during the thirties the
family income was very uncertain. My mother had a job selling
real estate. I had my first job when I was ten years old and had
a regular job most of the time after age twelve.
Father, Arthur Currier Lowell
Swent: What did your father do?
Lowell: My father was a mining engineer and had worked for raining
companies but during the Depression was unable to get a job as a
staff member of a mining company. He operated small mines in
southern Arizona during most of the 1930s, and these were really
small mines, usually with only two or three employed.
Swent: Copper mines?
Lowell: The mines were silver, lead, zinc, gold, and copper. There were
three or four different mines that he worked in. They were
usually optioned from someone and in some cases he acquired them
by staking the mining claim.
Swent: Had your father studied mining?
Lowell: My father attended Tufts College in Boston. He spent three years
in college, at which time his father died. My father grew up in
Farmington, Maine. His father was an apple broker. They were
reasonably well off, but there no longer was money for Dad s
education when his father died, and he left New England and came
to Arizona and Mexico.
Swent : When would this have been?
Lowell: That was about 1914, I believe, that he came to Arizona.
Swent: Was it a booming economy here at that time?
Lowell: Well, the population of Arizona at that time, I m guessing, was
only 5 percent of what it is now.
Swent: When was Bisbee the center of things? Around 1900, wasn t it?
Lowell: Yes, I think that s right.
Swent: Around 1900 to 1905; I m thinking that those are the years.
Lowell: My father worked in the Tiger Mine near what was later the San
Manuel Mine.
Swent: Had he studied engineering at Tufts?
Lowell: Yes. He lacked about one year of graduating at Tufts. He had
health problems, which was one of the reasons for leaving New
England also. He was over-age to be in the army in the First
World War, but he had earlier been a lieutenant in the National
Guard in Maine. My father was born April 11, 188A, and died
October 20, 195A.
Mother, Lavina Gumming Lowell
Lowell: My mother was born in Santa Cruz County, near Nogales, January 30,
1893, and died February 14, 1982. She grew up on a cattle ranch
and had five brothers, I believe.
Swent: What was her maiden name?
Lowell: Her name was Lavina Agnes Gumming.
The Lowell and Currier Families
Swent: And your father?
Lowell: Was Arthur Currier Lowell. His mother s family were Curriers. My
grandmother s family name was Currier, and presumably they were
part of the Currier, of Currier and Ives, family in New England.
Her name was Henrieta Currier. My father was a distant cousin of
Percival Lowell and Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell, and one
of his relatives had been a cavalry general in the Civil War who
was killed in battle. The family in Farmington was a small
family, and he was an only child; there are now no Lowells in
Farmington, Maine.
The Cumming Family
Lowell: My mother s faraily--ray mother s father s name was Douglas Wallace
Gumming. He was born in Picton, Ontario. His family were Scots
who had first immigrated to the United States. They were English
sympathizers in the Revolutionary War and had to move to Canada at
that time.
Swent: Loyalists?
Lowell: United Commonwealth Loyalists--! don t remember what that group
were called, but when I was a child I had thought that that branch
of the family were Americans in the Revolutionary War, and I found
out later that they were part of the Redcoats at the Battle of
Bunker Hill, instead.
Swent: How did you find that out?
Lowell: My sister is interested in family genealogy, and she has done
quite a bit to try to learn about the roots of the Cumming family,
and she has made a couple of trips to Scotland and has a family
tree worked out in Scotland.
Swent: But as a child you were not told much about this?
Lowell: No, I m not even sure my mother knew about this.
Swent: I wonder how the family came from Canada to Arizona.
Grandfather Douglas Wallace Cumming, a Wild West Adventurer
Lowell: Well, my grandfather was quite an unusual person.
Swent: This is your mother s father.
Lowell: My mother s father, Douglas Wallace Gumming. He ran away from
home and got a job as a cabin boy on a boat and sailed around the
Horn to California.
Swent : Do you know an approximate year for that?
Lowell: It was about 1855. He was born in 1834 and died in 1911. I have
a picture of him taken in California in 1860. After his voyage of
exploration, several other members of the family in Canada
immigrated to California, and I still have a fairly extensive set
of relatives in California. One of them was a lieutenant governor
of California, Warren Porter.
Swent: Where did they settle?
Lowell: They settled around Santa Cruz and Watsonville, California. My
mother was sent away to school at Santa Cruz when her mother died.
She was a young girl, and my grandfather decided that a cattle
ranch was not a good place for her to grow up, and she was sent to
Santa Cruz with a note pinned to her dress which said, "I am
Lavina Gumming.
"
This was used as a title for a fictionalized
biography by my daughter Susan Lowell Humphreys.
2
Swent: The cattle ranch was here?
Lowell: Not here, but it was near.
Swent: In Arizona. And Santa Cruz-
Lowell: The Arizona county for Nogales and Rio Rico and Tubac is Santa
Cruz County.
Swent: I m getting confused with Santa Cruz, California.
Lowell: Well, yes, it s a coincidence of names.
Swent: Where was your mother born?
Lowell: She was born also on a ranch near here, on the other side of the
valley.
Swent: But her father had been in California and then came here?
Lowell: Yes, but I skipped a good part of his history, which was pretty
colorful. He returned fromhe made two trips to California. The
first one, he sailed around the Horn as a cabin boy, and the
"Susan Lowell, I Am Lavina Gumming, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis,
MN, 1993.
second trip he went as far as the Isthmus of Panama and rode a
mule across Panama and got another ride up the West Coast. Back
in about 1870, he established a freight business and freighted in
wagons from Dodge City, Kansas, to Arizona and Sonora. But this
was back in the cowboys and Indians days. He was involved in
several Indian battles. He died before I was born, so I never met
him, but at the time he died he had two lead bullets in his body
that hadn t been removed. His left arm was partly disabled
because an arrow had gone through the biceps of his left arm, and
he had a groove on the top of his head where a bullet had just
grazed his head.
Swent : So you grew up hearing these kinds of stories, did you, about your
grandfather?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: That s wonderful.
Lowell: I ran into a fellow when I was a boy who told a story about
meeting my grandfather in Nogales, Sonora. He said he was walking
down the street, and a Mexican flew through a window in a saloon,
and he stopped in amazement, and then a second Mexican came
through the same window, and then my grandfather came out to make
sure they were not coming back in [laughter]. So this was back in
Wild West days.
Swent: Yes, indeed.
Lowell: My grandfather was the Indian agent to the Snake Indians for a
couple of years at one point.
Swent: Where were they?
Lowell: In Idaho, I believe. On the Snake River.
Swent: That s a long ways from Nogales.
Lowell: Yes. I think that was prior to Nogales time. The Snake Indians
were a branch of the Sioux Indians and very warlike Indians. They
may have been responsible for some of the lead bullets.
Swent: Could be.
Lowell: He had various adventures. He was present in Tombstone, Arizona,
during the OK Corral shootout and hid behind a woodpile to see all
the excitement. But he was one of the witnesses in this battle.
On another occasion he was freighting from Tombstone to Nogales
and sleeping under his wagon when a group of Apache Indians came
by and stole his team of horses, which were hobbled nearby, and
left their horses, which were in such bad shape that they were
pretty much ruined as horses. But they were in a hurry, and they
didn t look for him. He was under the wagon. As children, we
heard various stories of this sort.
He was in a battle in Mexico between Mexicans and Yaqui
Indians, who were attacking a little village where he was staying.
He first came to the Nogales area in 1876 and settled here
something like five or ten years later. Here on the ranch we have
the site of an Apache massacre. The Peck Canyon name comes from
the first rancher on our ranch, whose name was Peck. His family
and a cowboy working for him were killed by Indians about two
miles up the valley from here. The same group of Apaches who were
Geronimo s group, although Geronimo was probably not present in
this attack, in the same raid killed people in Ruby, Arizona,
which is just west of the northwest corner of our ranch. And my
grandfather was on the coroner s jury to establish the cause of
death of these people.
Swent : You said your grandfather died before you were born.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Who was telling you the stories about him?
Lowell: Well, my mother and uncle, who owned a ranch just across the
canyon, just north of the Atascosa Ranch. His name was John
Gumming.
Swent: So he was your mother s brother.
Lowell: My mother s mother s name was Frances Bigsby, I believe. She
immigrated to Arizona as a young woman, probably in her late
teens. She came from Missouri, and her father and two of her
uncles were killed fighting on the Confederate side in the Battle
of Shiloh in the Civil War. Her father was William Bigsby and her
mother was Melissa Gregory. The Bigsby family was largely
destroyed by these deaths, and Melissa went to California where
her twins were born but both her brother and mother died. She was
raised by her aunt and educated in a convent, then came to Nogales
where my grandfather met her, and they were married in Nogales.
She died at a young age. I think she was in her early thirties
when she died. This was my grandfather s second marriage. He had
been previously married in California to Mary Huntington and had
two children, Douglas Gray and Louise.
Let s see. I don t have a great deal of information about
my father s parents, but his mother died when Dad was in his early
teens, and his father married again, and his second wife s name
was Florence. His father died when Dad was about twenty years
old.
Swent : Do you have any idea what was the cause of her death?
Lowell: She died of cancer.
Swent: So many people died in those days of tuberculosis and other
diseases that we don t think of much now.
Lowell: I think 1 remember hearing that my mother s mother died of
diabetes. My grandfather s second wife s name was Florence, and
she came to Arizona and lived with us for several years when I was
a small child. Very kind, pleasant person. She was a music
teacher.
Swent: You said she came to Arizona.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Wasn t she here?
Lowell: No. My father s father died when he was a college student. That
date would have been about 1900, roughly. And Florence stayed in
Maine, evidently, from 1900 to 1930.
Swent: So this goes back to the Maine family.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: So there was contact, then, with the Maine branch of the family,
even though you were a long ways away.
Parents Marriage and Life in Peru
Lowell: That s correct, although my father never returned to Maine. They
were married in Nogales in about 1918.
Swent: When was your father born?
Lowell: My father was born April 11, 1884. He was a number of years older
than my mother, who was born January 30, 1893. Immediately after
they were married, they made a trip to Peru.
Lowell: My father had a job as a mining engineer and mill superintendent
in a mine called Santo Domingo, which is on the east slope of the
Andes, just above the Amazon jungle. They stayed there for three
years, I believe.
Swent : What kind of mine was it?
Lowell: It was a gold mine. My sister was born in Cuzco, Peru. My mother
had to ride a mule from the mine to Cuzco. Stayed in a hospital
there for several months.
Swent: Months?
Lowell: Months, yes. Prior to the birth and then for a little while
after. And my sister was carried back to the mine in a basket, in
a down comforter. I have some notes that my sister gave me about
their time in Peru, which I ll give you. I m not sure whether you
want to include them.
Swent: I think so.
Lowell: And also a little article that my mother wrote for the newspaper
in Santa Cruz, California.
Swent: She looked on it as a romantic adventure, I presume?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: That s just as well [chuckles].
Lowell: My mother was a fairly adventurous, very determined, hard-headed
person. I felt a great deal more sympathy for my father than for
my mother as a child. I m sure this has had an effect on all my
life.
10
II CHILDHOOD IN ARIZONA DURING THE DEPRESSION
Growing up in the Shadow of an Older Brother
Lowell: I grew up always being in trouble [chuckles] as a child. I was
the youngest of three children. My older brother always did
everything right. Had probably a more attractive personality.
And he was good-looking and athletic and larger and heavier than I
[chuckles]. I was kind of the Cinderella of the family during the
Depression.
Swent : Was your brother born in Peru also?
Lowell: My brother was born in Tucson.
Swent: I see. They came back after a few years in Peru.
Lowell: Yes. Offhand, I don t know why he was born in Tucson, but he was.
He was a member of the Tucson High baseball team and football team
and the track squad. When he was in college, he was the Border
Conference shotput champion, and he played on the University of
Arizona football team. I came along as a smaller, less
articulate, weaker, third edition and felt like I wasn t really
appreciated as a child. I had a job most of my childhood,
beginning at age twelve. I think the two factors of our family
being very poor and also sort of growing up in the shadow of an
older brother who was more highly rated in the family had quite a
bit to do with my subsequent life and career.
Swent: Let s talk a little bit about this notion of being poor. Did you
feel as a child that you were poor?
Lowell: Yes, definitely did.
Swent: We so often hear people say, "Well, looking back on it, I know we
were poor, but at the time I didn t think so." But you really
felt, even as a child--
11
Low-11: Yes, I did.
Swent: What sorts of things made you feel that?
Lowell: Oh, we were never on welfare, but we sometimes had trouble paying
the mortgage payment on our house. My mother had a job part of
the time, which was kind of unusual in the 1930s, and my father s
income was sometimes good but sometimes nonexistent. It was an
uncertain, unreliable way to support a family.
Swent: Did you have relatives that you had to ask for help? Were there
relatives in the picture?
Lowell: One of my mother s brothers, whose name was Bill Gumming, was
president of a bank in Watsonville, California. That family never
gave us money, but I grew up wearing cast-off clothing and that
sort of thing.
Swent: The bankers didn t always have an easy time in those years,
either.
Lowell: But we were kind of in "poor but proud" category. We didn t have
very much money, but we didn t accept monetary help, either.
Swent: What sort of jobs did your mother have?
Mother s Teaching at Palo Parado School
Lowell: She worked as a real estate salesman. She had been a
schoolteacher.
Swent: Had she gone to college?
Lowell: Yes. She graduated from what was then called Tempe Normal School,
which is now called Arizona State University.
Swent: So she did have a good education.
Lowell: Well, moderately good. She had gone through either a two- or
three-year course for becoming a schoolteacher. She taught school
for a number of years here in Santa Cruz County. There are a
number of stories about that, but she had a school that had one
less than the minimum number of students to be qualified for state
aid, and when she took over from the other teacher, the teacher
showed her the list of students, and she said, "There is something
you should know about Pablo Gonzales." Mother said, "What is
12
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell
Swent:
Lowell :
that?" The other teacher said, "Pablo is a dog that comes to
school but isn t strictly kosher." [laughter)
This also was back in pretty much the Wild West days, and
Mother wore a six-shooter to school as a schoolteacher because of
problems that they had at that time.
With whom?
With over-age students and bandido types around.
Did she ever use it?
No, no, she didn t.
She just felt better having it.
country?
This is a school out in the
Yes. You might have noticed a place name, driving to the ranch
this morning, that is called Palo Parado, and the school was
located there. There aren t even any ruins where the school was,
now. Her family ranch was called El Bosque. It was a place which
was an area of dense mesquite growth, in the river bottom. The
central part of the ranch was a homestead. The homestead had been
granted a patent by the government and was apparently perfectly
legal, and then there was a lawsuit and the heirs to the Spanish
land grant, Baca Float [a float is similar to a land grant] land
grant sued the government. The case went clear to the U.S.
Supreme Court where the homesteaders lost. So the government then
took the homestead away from mother s family, and they had to move
out. Their affluence dropped substantially at that point.
One of my uncles established a ranch next to our present
ranch, and the others the ones that were still living at the
ranch- -moved away. Two of them went to California. One of my
uncles attended Stanford University in California. I think the
uncle who was the bank president had had some university education
also.
A lot of good schooling in the background, along with all those
adventures. An emphasis on education, I would say.
Yes. We were raised to think that it was very necessary to have a
college education. My brother had been in the university for two
or three years when he went into the Marine Corps. He went into
the V-12 program and received a commission from the Marine Corps
in 1944 and was killed in March, 1945.
Swent: How old were you then?
13
Lowell: I was seventeen.
Swent : Seventeen. Did that affect you much?
Lowell: Yes, yes.
Swent: He was not married?
Lowell: No.
Swent: Your parents were still alive?
Lowell: Yes, they were still alive. It was, of course, a major tragedy in
our family.
Swent: You were living at home and still in high school, then.
Lowell: Yes. Yes, I was.
Swent: Where was the family home then?
Lowell: In Tucson. When I was seven years old, the family moved from near
here to Tucson.
Helping at Father s Mine from the Age of Seven
Lowell: That was also the point at which my father started operating small
mines. For several years, I spent my summers with my father,
living in tents at these small mines. When I was seven years old,
which would have been 1935, I lived at a mine near Arivaca,
Arizona. It was called Silver Hill. It had a shaft, something
like eighty or a hundred feet deep, into a vein. The ore was
hoisted with a windlass, a hand-cranked winch. It was dumped at
the collar of the shaft, and then hand-sorted. The higher grade
part of it was hauled in a pickup truck to an ore buyer.
Swent: I can guess who did the hand sorting?
Lowell: Yes. [laughter]
Swent: That was your job?
Lowell: That was my job or partly my job.
Swent: Who operated the windlass?
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent:
Lowell :
Oh, the Mexican miners and my father on occasion.
You didn t have to do that?
No, I wasn t big enough to do that. But I decided that my job was
really, probably, one of the best jobs in the world, and I decided
to be a mining engineer when I was seven years old.
Your father must have approached this as a good thing to do and
made it fun for you, did he?
I think so. I don t have very clear recollection of that. My
father was a quiet, considerate, kind person. He never gave me
much advice, but I think his example was one of the strongest
influences on my life.
Were you doing your own cooking?
Yes.
Perpetual camping out?
Yes. Well, not exactly camping out. The tent had wooden walls
and a door, and we had a stove which burned wood. The coyotes
would come around at night and howl, and our dog would bark at
them.
Was your brother doing this, too?
No. He was in Tucson at that time. 1 lived at several of these
mines over a period of four or five years. The Silver Hill mine
was a very isolated location. Our mine was probably eight or ten
miles from the village of Arivaca, population fifty people, and on
a rut road. I several years later learned to drive a car on one
of these mine roads, when 1 was maybe twelve years old. We used
to hunt rabbits and doves and quail as a source of meat for the
pot. I grew up learning to shoot guns and hunt as a young boy.
Let s see. That takes us up into the 1930s.
various times raised chickens and sold eggs.
In Tucson?
The family at
In Tucson. Some of my jobs were feeding the chickens and taking
care of the eggs and selling eggs and so forth. My father
operated a service station and garage for a while when I was about
ten years old and I worked in the service station and put gas in
cars from a hand pump which filled a glass walled reservoir. I
wore an oil cloth cap which said Signal Oil. The customers often
This is a story of the Tunquipata mine as David recalls it.
"In 1936 my father acquired a mineral prospect in the Las
Guijas Mountains about ten miles west of Arivaca , Arizona. The pros
pect was named Tunquipata after a Quechua Indian word in Peru
which meant cock of the walk. 1
The generating plant at the Santo
Domingo mine in Peru (where my mother and father lived for three years)
was also located at a place called Tunquipata.
"The Tunquipata mine was one of the few mineral ventures
which turned out profitably for my parents. It was a gold-tungsten
deposit, and my dad operated it profitably on a small scale for about
two years, then sold it. While it was in operation my father and an
average of two Mexican-American miners worked in the mine drilling
the vein by hand with single jack 4-pound hammers and hand steel
which was sharpened every night in a forge. Housing consisted of a
tent and an open kitchen with a small wood stove, and transportation
and ore truck were combined in a second-hand pickup truck.
"The mine had had an unusual history in that, according to
legend, it had been originally worked by the Spaniards or early Mexi
cans, and later 20 or 30 years before my father acquired it, it had
been opened up by Americans and had been the site of a fatal accident
in a cave-in. The local Mexican-Americans were firmly convinced
that it was haunted, and they had much evidence to support this view.
I remember as a seven-year-old boy lying on my cot at night and lis
tening to my father and the Mexican miners telling ghost stories about
25
14b
the mine;. All present had had the experience of hearing a tapping
noise in the bottom of the mine as of a long-dead Spanish miner drill
ing with hand steel somewhere out in the rock. Verdusco, a one-
legged miner, swore that he had heard a ghost pass him in the tunnel
and climb down the ladder into the mine. Reyes Palomares, my dad s
long-term assistant in mining ventures, had many other stories about
supernatural events at Tunquipata, but the most difficult happenings
to explain were jointly experienced by my father and my brother Bill
who worked two summers at the mine. On two occasions radio pro
grams were heard in the camp or on the hill above camp, but there
was no radio in camp and no other people living for several miles in
any direction. At this time portable radios were rare, and it is very
difficult to explain the origin of the sounds of the radio program. My
father thought that minerals in the vein might have converted radio
waves into sound waves in some way, but this seems very unlikely.
The Tunquipata was definitely a spooky place.
"My father owned a small shaggy dog named Rags. Rags
lived at all of our mineral prospects and chased (but never caught) in
numerable rabbits, and hid from (and was never caught by) innumerable
coyotes. Rags always barked when the round was spitted because he
knew that soon the dynamite blasts would be detonated at which time
his function was to throw a perfect fit of barking until smoke stopped
coming out of the shaft. Our pickup broke down en route to Tucson
once, and my father had to hail down the Tucson stage and get a ride
into town. He knew that dogs were not allowed on the bus, so he had
previously placed Rags in a cardboard carton with air holes. The driver
placed the box on the rack on the roof, and Rags, in complete silence,
rode into Tucson and was reclaimed in the bus station.
"At the Tunquipata mine there were many mockingbirds or
wee-ta-coches as they were called by the Mexicans. Over a period
of time my father and the miners taught one of these birds several
words, and he would also whistle back tunes from a tree near the tent
and imitate portions of songs. There were also coyotes that howled
In the distance and owls that hooted at night, and sometimes at night
small foxes barked on the opposite side of the canyon. During the day
white-winged doves called from the mesquite and hackberry trees in
the canyon. I visited the site of Tunquipata two years ago, which was
thirty-four years after I lived there as a small boy. All of the distances
have shrunk from what they were in 1936, and you can now barely see
where our tent was located and the kitchen and the forge. I don t know
whether the poor Spanish miner is still down tapping in the rock on his
hand steel, but there would be worse places for him to work than the
Tunquipata."
26
15
pumped the handle for me because I was so small. I rode the bus
to a downtown bank each week and did the family banking.
I got good grades in school through about junior high
school, and I was a very undistinguished high school student. Did
very little homework and had kind of a poor attitude, but got B s
and C s, probably.
Swent: But you said you were working from the time you were twelve.
Lowell: Yes. Through most of high school I had a job delivering
newspapers. I rode my bicycle twenty miles a day every day which
took up a good part of my time after I got out of school.
Swent: And energy.
Lowell: I graduated from high school when I was seventeen years old. That
was the year my brother was killed, and the war was still on.
This was 1945. A friend of mine from high school and I made a
trip to Phoenix, which was the Marine Corps recruiting office, and
took our physicals to enlist in the Marine Corps. I was unable to
enlist because I didn t have--my parents hadn t signed my form. I
came back to Tucson and negotiated with them on this point, and by
good luck or bad luck, depending on how you look at it, that was
the date of the Hiroshima atom bomb, and I was able to guess that
perhaps the war would end very quickly. And it did. By that time
I had my form signed, but I didn t enlist in the Marine Corps. If
I had, it would have subsidized my university education and maybe
have matured my personality, which was still pretty immature. But
in any case, that was a little, significant crossroads.
[My closest friend as a boy five to fifteen years old was my
cousin Kendall Gumming who lived on the Circle Five Ranch just
north of our present Atascosa Ranch. Kendall is two years older
and has always been a rough and tumble guy who was a boxer and
pole vaulter and football player and rodeo bull rider and bronc
rider and paratrooper wounded in the Battle of Bastogne. As a
junior sidekick I tried with limited success to imitate a number
of these activities, but I grew up convinced that Real Men do A,
B, C, et cetera. Kendall after the war got an M.S. in range
ecology and worked for the BIA and eventually became BIA
superintendent for the Gila Indian Reservation and also the
Jacarilla Apache Reservation and now works as a consultant for
ranchers dealing with the federal government.]
1
This paragraph was added by Mr. Lowell during the editing process.
16
III ARIZONA COLLEGE OF MINES, 1945 TO 1949
Playing Football and a Warning from Dean Chapman
Lowell: I entered the University of Arizona in September 1945 and was
admitted to the College of Mines because I scored well on the
placement test. I was in the top decile. It was a little bit
difficult to get into the College of Mines at that time. I got in
okay, but I had some trouble staying for the next two years. I
also played on the University of Arizona football team in the fall
of 1945. I was on the varsity team but not a first-team member.
Swent : You must have played in high school as well?
Lowell: I did one year in high school. I also learned about going out
with girls, which I had never done in high school, and worked for
the newspaper, and I was taking ROTC. The sergeant who was in
charge of the rifle team noticed that I was a good rifle shot and
invited me to be a member of the rifle team. I rode Brahma bulls
and was in the wild mule riding contest in the university rodeo.
All in all, I had lots of fun for one or two semesters, until the
chickens came home to roost, and the dean of the College of Mines
told me that it didn t look good for me to be able to stay in the
College of Mines. He criticized me frequently for having
demonstrated the capacity to be an engineer through my placement
test and being about to flunk out because of sloth and lack of
seriousness.
Swent: Were you living at home?
Lowell: No. My family at about that same time had movedhad bought a
cotton farm north of Tucson, near Red Rock, Arizona, and sold
their house in Tucson. They were living there, so I lived in the
dormitory.
Swent: Were you working then too?
17
Lowell: Yes. I worked every summer while I was in university and had
part-time jobs during the school year. The total money
contribution to my education all together by my family was about
five hundred dollars, and the rest of it 1 earned myself.
Swent: And you were on the football team and ROTC and working part-time?
Lowell: Working part-time.
Swent: And discovering girls.
Lowell: Yes [chuckles].
Swent: Dating. It sounds like a busy year.
Lowell:
Swent:
Lowell ;
I didn t get F s, but I got some D s and C s, which Dean Chapman
didn t judge to be up to snuff for intelligent minds.
This was Thomas Chapman, was it?
telling you this?
How did you feel about his
I became a good friend of Dean Chapman, and the reason was the
rules. We had a pre-delinquent list and a delinquent list every
semester at the University of Arizona. For my first two and a
half years in the College of Mines I had a perfect score of
showing up on every pre-d-list and every d-list, and the d-list
required a heart-to heart conference with the dean of the college,
and so after a while we got very well acquainted [chuckles]. Dean
Chapman was one of the people in my life that had faith in me, so
that was part of my academic career.
I played spring football in 1946. At that time, when you
went out for football, it occupied about fourteen hours a week of
your time, and most of the other people playing football were
studying agriculture or something that was an easy course. The
engineering course required a lot more time. After spring
football, I had one of my conferences with Dean Chapman, and he
said, "Dave, in my ten years as dean of the College of Mines, I ve
had one student who played football and graduated on time, and I
am absolutely certain that you re not going to be the second one."
[chuckles] I thought this over, and--I enjoyed football more than
almost anything that I had done, but the awful thought of having
to go to university another year decided me to give up playing
football.
But by my sophomore year, I had pretty much shot myself in
the foot with a poor performance the first year, and my work
18
ethics improved slightly but my grades not too much the sophomore
year, but my junior year, I startod to do better as a student.
Swent: What about your teachers? Did they play any role in all of this?
Lowell: Not too much. They had been pretty impersonal about things, I
think. I had a little incident in my senior year. A normal
workload for an engineering student was seventeen or eighteen
hours of work per semester, and when I started my senior year, 1
determined that I was going to have to complete a total of forty-
eight hours of work if 1 graduated on time. So I laid out a
program which was twenty-five hours the first semester and twenty-
three hours the second semester.
Swent :
Lowell
The professor who was my
with, was a pretty hard-boiled
[chuckles] fellow. You had to
approved, and I presented this
didn t say anything. I said,
that?" And he said, "I think
But I was able to complete all
But at graduation time, I wasn
advisor, that I had to discuss this
short-spoken, unhumorous
present your program and get it
program, and he looked at it and
"Well, what do you think about
you re a damn fool." [laughter]
of these hours during the year.
t sure I was going to graduate.
It was kind of a calculated risk as to whether to pay my fee
for my cap and gown because a grade point average of a certain
number was required for graduation, and mine was right on the
borderline. I had flunked one course in college, which was
differential calculus, and I had to take it again my last
semester. It was taught by a young lady that I thought was kind
of a nice person. When I took my final exam, that was a swing
course. I knew what grades I was getting in the others, but if I
got a B in calculus, I would graduate, and if I got a C in
calculus, I would have to come back for another semester. I don t
remember her name, but I thought this was a pretty serious
problem, and I went out to a florist and I bought an orchid
[laughs], which I presented along with my final exam, and I
explained to her what my problem was. She made no comment
whatsoever [laughs], but I got the B. [laughter] I may have
deserved it. I m not totally sure of that.
I m not clear on why you had to take all these forty-eight hours
your senior year.
It was to make up this calculus course. I didn t flunk anything
else. I don t remember offhand, but I may have had a light
semester in which I didn t take one course I was supposed to.
Swent: But you did graduate,
19
Lowell: I did graduate. I had gotten married the sprirg of the previous
year.
Swent : Of your junior year.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: You squeezed in a lot of activity!
Lowell: [chuckles]
Wife Edith Walmisley Sykes
Swent: How did you meet your wife?
Lowell: Well, on a skiing trip.
Swent: So you were also skiing.
Lowell: Well, sort of. There was a small ski run on Mt . Lemmon, outside
of Tucson, which is a 9000-f oot-high mountain. My roommate, whose
name is Jack McGee, had gone out with Edith previously, and all
three of us were on this trip to Mt . Lemmon. I actually ended up
not skiing but running the rope tow. It was sort of a do-it-
yourself arrangement, and I knew something about gasoline engines,
and so I ended up running the tow.
Swent: What was Edith s maiden name?
Lowell: Sykes. Edith Walmisley Sykes.
Swent: So that s how you met each other. Was she a student also at the
university?
Lowell: Yes, she was a student. She graduated a year earlier and worked
in the English Department as a secretary my last year in college.
Swent: You were married while you were still a student also.
Lowell: Yes. I was let s see--I was twenty years old when I was married.
Swent: And it has lasted over fifty years.
Lowell: Yes [chuckles].
Swent: That s wonderful. How did your family react to your marriage?
20
Lowell: Well, they were worried that this would cause- me to drop out of
school. I was married in March of my junior year. I was married
in 1948. We were both students that year, and then the following
year, when 1 finished up, she was working in the English
Department and I was a student.
1946 Summer Job at Idarado, "A Real Roughneck Mine
Lowell: One of my summer jobs when I was in college: I hitchhiked to
Ouray, Colorado, and got a job in Idarado Mine and worked as a
miner and a timberman one summer.
Swent: What summer would that have been?
Lowell: That was between my freshman and sophomore year.
Swent: So that was 46.
Lowell: Forty-six.
Swent: And Idarado was--
Lowell: Complex lead, zinc, copper, gold mine. Newmont .
Swent: --one of those that was made possible by the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, I think. A big war effort.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Who was there then? Whom did you work with?
Lowell: I don t remember the mine manager s name. His name was Bob
something or other. The Idarado Mine was a real roughneck mine.
The mine manager claimed, untruthfully, that he never had a man
work for him that he couldn t whip, and there were a couple of
fistfights to continue this tradition. Most of my shift one
Monday morning were in jail in Silverton, Colorado [chuckles].
There were some pretty tough, hard-bitten guys working in the
mine. It was an underground mine at about 9,000-foot elevation.
No, it was 11,000. The mine was at 11,000, and Ouray, I think,
was at 9,000.
My direct supervisor was a fellow named Bob Cockle. He was
a young engineer who had just gotten out of the army. He came
down with pneumonia at the mine and died the next day.
21
He could probably have been saved if they had moved him down
to Ouray or somewhere. I worked on a contract mine crew, where we
were paid on the basis of the number of tons of ore that we
produced and we earned a bonus over day s pay rate. There were
five of us, I think, on the contract, and one fellow was referred
to as Big Joe and another one as Little Joe. Big Joe was a
Hispanic fellow, kind of middle-aged and nice guy, who was about
my size. And Little Joe was a fellow who was about six-two or
six-four and had just gotten out of the paratroops.
We had to carry very heavy equipment up into the stope, and
one of our pieces of equipment was the stoper. Another piece of
equipment was a leyner, which mounted on a column bar. The leyner
had two parts: the column bar and the pneumatic drill, and they
each weighed on the order of--one weighed 100 pounds, and the
other 120 pounds. They were very hard to transport because we had
to go up ladders and across broken rock and whatnot.
Swent: At 11,000 feet.
Lowell: Yes, at 11,000 feet. I was carrying one of these things and
Little Joe was carrying the other, and 1 was stumbling and making
slow progress, and he impatiently grabbed my piece and carried
both of them up [laughs].
Swent: You ve referred to your size. How tall are you?
Lowell: I used to claim to be five-ten and a half, and I m probably more
like five-ten now.
Swent: And at that time how much did you weigh?
Lowell: I weighed 165 pounds because that was my weight when I played
football and it s my weight now. I ve never--
Swent : You never changed your weight.
Lowell: Never changed my weight.
Swent: That s wonderful.
Lowell: I was considerably stronger and huskier then in terms of muscles,
but that was pretty vigorous stuff.
Swent: Yes. You said you were paid on a contract. How much were you
making at that time?
Lowell: That I don t remember, but I think it was something like two or
three dollars an hour, but of course, with inflation--
22
Swent : Do you recall what you were paying for board or room?
Lowell: I stayed in the bunkhouse and--
Swent: The company provided the bunkhouse?
Lowell: Yes. And I don t think I paid anything for board and room.
Swent: That might have been part of your pay.
Lowell: But it wasn t like your hotel [laughs].
Swent: No, not the Tubac Golf Club. But they provided food as well?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Did you carry your lunch into the mine or come up?
Lowell: Carried lunch into the mine. I sometimes ate four meals. The
bunk that I stayed in was only for--it was only a twelve-hour-a-
day bunk. Somebody else slept in it on the other shift. I tried
to get a job in which I would have worked two shifts, which was
permissible. I don t remember why--I guess the job opening on the
other shift disappeared.
Swent: How did you go about getting this job?
Lowell: Well, I hitchhiked to Colorado, and I showed up at the mine, and
there was a line of people applying for jobs, and when it got to
be my time, I talked to the mine foreman, and he hired me.
Swent: Just on the basis of conversation? Did you have to have a
physical exam?
Lowell: I don t think so. I might have, but 1 don t remember. I got a
little special consideration at times because I was a mining
engineering student. A couple of times they let me hold an end of
the tape on a survey crew, but mostly I worked in the production
part of the mine.
Swent: It s such a contrast to the way things are now; they took your
word for it that you were a student? Or did you have to bring
transcripts or something?
Lowell: No. It didn t cut very much ice anyway because I was hired as a
miner .
Swent: But they just took your word for it. No background check.
23
Lowell: Oh, wellhere is a little overlap in some of your own experience.
The company consulting metallurgist was Frank McQuiston.
1
Frank
McQuiston came to the mine, and I don t remember how 1 met him,
but somebody-- maybe Bob Cockle said to him, "This is a mining
engineering student from the University of Arizona." As you
remember, he was a very nice guy. He came by the university
later. I m not sure that I even saw him at Arizona, but he talked
to Dean Chapman and told the dean that everybody at Idarado
thought I was doing a very good job. Chapman told me that in one
of these inspirational lectures [chuckles], which ended with, "Why
don t you do better?"
Collecting Mineral Specimens in Mexico, 1947
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell i
Swent :
Lowell :
The next year I made a trip--I spent the summer in Mexico with
another student from the College of Mines, whose name was Dan King,
This was 19A7.
Forty-seven. We spent the summer collecting mineral specimens for
sale. Dan had a business, part-time business, selling mineral
specimens. We traveled around Chihuahua and Durango and Coahuila
--most of the time without any--we didn t have a vehicle, but we
got rides, rode on freight trucks and trains and ox carts, buses
and--
What did you do with your specimens?
pretty heavy after a while.
They must have been getting
Well, we packed them up and shipped them back. That was kind of
interesting and exciting also, kicking around.
Did all your specimens get here in good shape?
Yes, yes. It was a pretty businesslike job. I didn t make a
great deal of money from that summer but probably as much as I had
from the previous summer working in the mine. I did some of that
mineral specimen work through the following winter also.
Swent: What sorts of specimens were you collecting?
See Frank Woods McQuiston, Jr., "Metallurgist for Newmont Mining
Corporation and U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1934-1982," Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley,
1989.
Lowell: Wulfanite--cubicle wulfanite and vanadnite and fish tail twin
calcite crystals. Descloizite was another one, I remember.
Adamite, which is a very rare green zinc arsenate mineral.
Los Lamentos Mine , Chihuahua
Swent : You were able to just go out and pick them up?
Lowell: Well, these were in old mines in specific, known localities. We
hired Mexican miners to help us and established little camps. One
of the places we worked was a very interesting spot. It was
called Los Lamentos, Chihuahua.
Swent: It sounds a little sad.
Lowell: Well, it had been operated by an American company back around the
turn of the century. It was quite a large underground mine, fifty
miles of mine workings. It was in heavy ground, kind of difficult
rock for mining, in a period when there was less concern about
mine safety, and there had been lots of fatal mine accidents in
the mine. There was a small group of independent gambesino-type
miners working while we were there, and they told us that fifty
men had been killed all together. The custom was to put up a two-
by-four cross at the site of the death.
Lowell: Dan and I lived with a Mexican couple in a house with dirt floors,
and we shared the accommodations with a man and his wife, who were
middle-aged Mexicans, and two pigs. It offended me having these
pigs in the house, and on one occasion I gave one a little boot,
and he turned around and tried to bite my foot [chuckles] so I
gave up that idea.
Swent: Did you have beds?
Lowell: Yes, the standard bed then and on other trips to Mexico was a
homemade canvas cot made out of two-by-four lumber and a piece of
canvas across the frame.
Swent: That should be pretty practical in hot weather, wasn t it? And
clean.
Lowell: Yes, clean and comfortable. We had standard breakfast, which was
oatmeal. We stayed at Los Lamentos for about ten days or two
weeks, and I had assumed that it was a mixture of oatmeal and rice
25
Swent :
Lowell :
that we were eating, and about the day before we left I happened
to fish out one of these rice grains and looked at it carefully,
and it had little legs and little eyes [chuckles], and they were
weevils [laughs].
And I pointed this out with horror to Dan, and he said, "Oh,
I noticed that right at the beginning but I thought it would be in
poor taste to mention it." The drifts were driven by small
Mexican miners, and the back, the roof of the drift, was lower
than my height and so I had to lean over and the first day banged
my head a couple of times. We didn t have hardhats, but I found a
straw hat that one of the Mexicans had thrown away outside of the
mine, and I cut the brim off until it was only three or four
inches wide and wore that to protect my head. The Mexicans kidded
me about the hat. They thought it looked funny.
The day we left, we were saying goodbye to the Mexicans,
some of whom we had gotten pretty well acquainted with. They
grabbed my hat and staged an impromptu Mexican hat dance
[laughter] .
You probably had a nickname. They always give nicknames to
people. Did you ever find out what it was?
No, neither there nor at the Buena Tierra Mine, where I was later
engineer and mine foreman. But in general I got along well with
the Mexican miners.
Swent: Did you know Spanish?
Lowell: Well, when I was a small child, Mother had kind of a housekeeper-
maid named Carolina that taught me some Spanish, say, at age two
or three or four years old. Edith says that the reason for my
comparative fluency and good accent go back to that time. I m not
sure that s true, but there might be an element of truth in that.
Then I took Spanish in high school during my poor scholar days and
learned some there, so I spoke kind of poor Spanish at that time.
In the Los Lamentos Mine there had been a miner who was
decapitated in a mine accident. He was the source of
superstitious stories. When we sat around in the evening or while
we were working underground with the miners, they told us stories
about this headless, ancient miner showing up and frightening
them. They were absolutely convinced that there was a ghost in
the mine. Dan and I kind of laughed about it when we were talking
apart from the Mexicans.
On one occasionwell, we often split up and Dan would go to
one area and I would go to another to collect specimens. On this
26
occasion, we had one helper. We went to my stope first, and the
helper and Dan went off somewhere else. We were planning to meet
in three hours again, maybe to have lunch. There was a lot of
heavy ground in the mine and old timbers that creaked with weight
shifting on them. I was working alone and I had a carbide light,
like one of these [gestures to display of several dozen old mine
lamps], for light. Carbide lights are notoriously temperamental.
This one plugged up and went out, and I was in pitch dark, a mile
underground .
Swent: It was that deep?
Lowell: Well, it was that far from the surface. There were fifty miles of
mine workings, so it was a pretty extensive rabbit warren of
workings. You have a little piece of thin wire attached to your
carbide light for \this purpose, and I tried to unplug it and get
it lighted again and was unable to, so then I was faced with the
prospect of sitting in the dark for two or three hours, waiting
for my companions to come back. And I started listening to the
timbers creaking and little pebbles rolling down the muckpile, and
then I got to thinking about the story of the headless miner, and
then I noticed that these noises, which had first been farther
away, were getting closer and closer [laughs], and finally
hallucinations convinced me that, by God, there I was in the stope
with that ghost [laughter) and nothing to do but grin and bear it.
Finally, I heard footsteps and saw light from my buddies coming
back, and we got my light working again.
Swent: It must have been a terrible experience.
Aguas Calientes Mine, Chihuahua, Summer of 1948
Lowell: The third summer vacation in college, which would have been 1948--
Swent: By now you were married.
Lowell: I was married, and I was beginning to show faint signs of promise
to Dean Chapman. I was actually getting pretty good grades by
then. Somebody went to see Dean Chapman to ask if he could supply
a student engineer to work for a summer in Mexico. He called me
in and asked me if I was interested, and I said yes. The salary
sounded pretty good, and so Edith and I went to a place in Sonora,
near the Chihuahua border in the Sierra Madre Mountains, called
Chinipas. The mine was called Aguas Calientes.
27
There wasn t a road into this camp, and the way we got to
the mine was in a small plane from Navajoa, Sonora.
Swent: What kind of plane?
Lowell: It was something like a Ryan- -let s see. That s maybe not the
right name.
Swent: There was a Ryan.
Lowell: Well, that s what it was. It was basically a three-place
airplane. The pilot this was not a regular plane service but
just a fellow that did charter flying on a part-time basis--his
name, I remember, was Asencion [laughs], which Edith thought was
funny, for a pilot. We flew over one range of the mountains and
landed at Chinipas in a goat pasture, in this little plane. The
other alternative way to get there was a two-day mule ride from
Alamos, Sonora.
I spent the summer working there. We lived in a one-room
thatched hut with a dirt floor and a very large centipede who
lived in the thatch and showed up. He was about that long
[demonstrating] and about this wide [demonstrating].
Swent: About a foot long.
Lowell: I soon figured out that this was a promotional mine, not really a
serious mine.
Swent: What were they supposed to be mining?
Lowell: Gold. And there was a gold vein, but they were really selling
stock in Florida.
Swent: What was the company?
Lowell: I think it was called Compania Aguas Calientes, but I m not
certain of that.
Swent: What were you doing?
Lowell: I was kind of the mine engineer and kind of a mine shift boss.
Swent: Was there some production going on?
Lowell: Yes, a little bit [chuckles], but it clearly was not profitable.
Swent: Did they just ship ore? Was there any processing at all?
28
Lowell: There was a mill, twenty-ton-a-day mill. One of the jobs that I
had was as acting mill superintendent when the mill superintendent
went out on vacation. I was mill superintendent for two weeks.
The mining camp was about eight miles from the town of Chinipas,
which was a little village, very pretty little village. We used
to ride mules down to Chinipas. The mine foreman, whose name was
Ramon, who was a very flamboyant guy who sang and- -do you know the
name Jorge Negrete?
Swent : Oh, my, yes.
Lowell: Well, Edith had a bunch of Jorge Negrete records, and Ramon was a
would-be Jorge Negrete [chuckles].
Swent: He sang ranchero kinds of songs, yes.
Lowell: He also was very enthusiastic about little romances with young
girls and whatnot. The fuel for the mine was hauled in maybe
fifteen-gallon barrels, on mules; and the empty barrels collected
at the mining camp, which was right on the Chinipas River, a fair-
sized river. Ramon and I decided that a good thing to do would be
to make a raft out of these empty barrels. We got some lumber and
tied about maybe ten of the barrels together, and with ropes--!
think we had one oar to steer it with and some poles. Edith went
with us, and we were going down to a wedding in Chinipas. We had
some party clothes that we had in a bundle.
Swent: So the mine was also on this river.
Lowell: Yes. Well, the camp was. The mine was back in the hills a little
way. The raft wasn t too bad, but neither of us knew anything
about steering a raft, and Ramon couldn t even swim. This river
had some rapids in it and we almost immediately got in trouble
banging into things. Part of the raft fell apart, and 1 think I
had to jump into the river to save us once. When we got close to
Chinipas, I decided that 1 had to change my pants into the dry
pair I had brought along for the party, and 1 took my pants off on
the raft and was kind of teetering and trying to get the new pair
on, and we came around a bend, and there was a delegation largely
of ladies waiting to see Ramon [laughs), which was very
embarrassing. But not to the Mexicans [laughter].
We spent the night. Ramon and I bought a bottle of liquor
which was called habanero. Do you know that? It s a kind of a
brandy-sort of drink. Not very good [chuckles].
Swent: I was wondering if it was Cuban rum. From Havana?
Lowell: That s possible.
29
Swent : I m just guessing it might.
Lowell: With that name--I hadn t ever thought about it, but that name
sounds likewe had several drinks and there was some pre-nuptial
parties with a brass band type of orchestra. We attended the
wedding. We were staying in a hotel that was sort of partly a
house. The room that we were giventhere weren t walls all the
way to the ceiling, and we could kind of hear what was going on in
the next room. But our room had somebody s knitting on one chair
and a cat sleeping in another chair [chuckles], and it had a kind
of barred window.
The wedding was very gay and interesting, and we met all
kinds of local people. It was a poor community. It was strictly
a mountain village. Then we went back and went to bed, and those
were also cots, these canvas cots. After we had gone to sleep,
there was a great clatter, and it was Ramon returning to serenade
Edith with this orchestra, which he had acquired somewhere in the
middle of the evening. Edith was very excited; it was the first
time she had been serenaded. But there was a reason for the
serenade, and after it was over, Ramon said, "iDonde esta el
habanero?" [laughs] So I passed it out through the bars [of the
window] and they went off.
The next morning, we had to return without Ramon because he
had gotten into a romantic adventure with some lady, and the
lady s brother had threatened to kill him with a pistol, and Ramon
had had to flee [laughs].
The other thing that happened that summer was our
bookkeeper, who paid the payroll, went out to collect the money
for the payroll, on a mule, and was ambushed and killed when he
stopped to open a gate. There had been quite a bit of talk of
bandidos and so on before, and we knew this wasn t an entirely
safe part of the world. Then we went down to Chinipas to the
funeral. A day or two later, the ruraJes showed up.
Swent: These are the local police?
Lowell: Well, they were the federal rural police. They were on horseback
and had bandoliers across their chests and carried rifles and had
pistols and were very tough, mean-looking group. The first thing
they did was demand payment from the mine manager, which he wasn t
in a position to refuse [chuckles]. They poked around and talked
to people and frightened everybody. They eventually determined
that the murderer was the Chinipas police chief s son. For that
reason, I think he wasn t prosecuted, but my memory is a little
hazy about what happened. But I had taken a revolver with me on
30
this trip, and after that incident carried it whenever we went out
on muleback.
Eventually the summer came to an end, and we elected to ride
out instead of getting the airplane to pick us up. It was a
pretty rough ride. In order to make the connection with the bus,
we had to move right along. We trotted in the flat spaces, of
which there weren t too many. It was a good, hard mule ride. In
the afternoon of the first day, we were with an arriero [muleteer]
named Don Cuco, who was also the manufacturer of the local bootleg
tequila which is called bacanora.
Edith got a strong pain in her side and had to stop beside
the trail, and she said to me, "I hate to tell you this, but I m
getting appendicitis, and I m almost certain to die here and it
will be very sad for my parents and for you."
I said, "Oh, forget it! You re suffering from mule riding."
[chuckles] So that cheered her up to some extent. We rode over a
range of hillsmountains ; they were fairly high. Pine trees.
We spent the night in a place called Lower Aripinapichic .
There was Upper Aripinapichic and Lower Aripinapichic. We stayed
in a house, slept on the ground in a house with fleas and
mosquitoes. I ve never been very attractive to mosquitoes, but
Edith is and Don Cuco was. I managed to keep my head covered up
and was able to sleep more or less. At about four o clock in the
morning, Don Cuco got us up, Edith thought, because he couldn t
stand the mosquitoes any more.
We started off on the trail, and it was pretty steep
country. One of our mules fell off the trail and rolled down the
mountainside .
Swent : With someone on it?
Lowell: No. But our suitcases were on it. And he ended up upside down on
top of our suitcases, with all four legs sticking up. I had a
flashlight, and we picked our way down the mountain. I thought he
was dead, and Don Cuco said, "No, he s all right." He went off
and he found a pole and got under the uphill side and levered him,
and he rolled over a couple of more times and landed on his feet
and brayed, and Don Cuco led him back up the trail [chuckles].
Our suitcases were pretty mashed, but they weren t terribly high
quality to begin with.
So we started riding again. We had to stop periodically to
let Edith recover from her pains [chuckles].
31
Swent : You were on a mule ride from the mine down to Navajoa, I guess.
Lowell: I m not sure whether it was Navajoa or San Bernardo.
Swent: You had just gotten the mule back on the trail [chuckles], and now
you re starting off again.
Lowell: Edith s mule was named Limonsilla. She bitterly said that she had
figured out where the name came from because of the rough ride and
difficulty in reining and so forth. 1 believe that the place
where we arrived was called San Bernardo.
Swent: This was two days of hard mule riding.
Lowell: Yes. We arrived in time to catch the little bus, which was really
more like a station wagon, that went into Navajoa. It was sort of
an open-air, small cafe--small townand the table that we picked
had an oilcloth tablecloth hanging down. We sat down at the
table, and there was a whole litter of pigs under the table, and
they scattered in all directions [chuckles] between our legs.
Those are probably the highlights of that summer vacation, not
summer job.
Swent: Just a little bit about that mine. There was plenty of water,
then, for the mine?
Lowell: Yes, yes, there was.
Swent: And what sort of mill was it?
Lowell: It had a grindingit had a small crusher and a ball mill and
flotation and Wilfley table.
Swent: It had a lot of things, then.
Lowell: Oh, very small.
Swent: Was this the first time that you had been a mill superintendent?
Lowell: Yes [chuckles], and my qualification was that I had had completed
two or three metallurgy courses and so I knew what the function of
the machines were.
Swent: I take it in the little mines that your father had had in those
summers he was not processing the ore?
Lowell: No, no. It was always hand sorted.
32
Swent : And then just selling it?
Lowell: The hand-sorted, high-grade--
Swent : Where had he sold what he produced?
Lowell: Well, there was an ore buyer in Nogales who was also the assayer.
His name was Hugo Miller. I think some of the ore may have been--
he may have shipped ore directly to a smelter or to a custom mill
part of the time, but I m not certain of that. Most of our mine
supplies were bought in Tucson. In the very center of downtown
Tucson there was a department store called Steinf ield s .
They
sold clothing, and it was also a grocery store and hardware store.
I remember we would go to Steinf ield s and buy a box of dynamite
and a box or two of caps, detonators, and dynamite fuse. Now you
almost have to have an act of Congress to be able to buy dynamite.
You have to have permits and certifications, and it can t possibly
be sold in cities. But those were the good old days.
Swent: Certainly not along with clothing and groceries! [laughter] So
in your father s mines what sort of mining procedure were they
doing? Just drilling and blasting?
Lowell: The drilling was usually done with hand steel and single jack
hammers; this is a four-pound hammer with a short handle and you
hit the steel and then you rotate it ninety degrees and hit it,
and rotate it again and--a very slow, labor-intensive way to get a
hole drilled. 1 think once or twice we had air compressors and
hoses and jack hammers, but the more common thing was just
drilling with hand steel.
Swent: At Los Lamentos, was that the same sort of thing you were doing?
Lowell: We were not drilling and blasting there. We were collecting
mineral specimens and rock that was already broken. Sometimes we
hired miners to drill a hole or two to break a slab for us, but
not usually.
Swent: And at Chinipas [Aguas Calientes Mine]?
Lowell: At Chinipas there was an air compressor and air lines and hoses
and so forth.
Swent: I see, so this was more advanced.
Lowell: Yes [chuckles].
Swent: And, of course, at Idarado you were using very up-to-date--
33
Lowell: For the time.
Swent : The leyners and so on. So you were getting a variety of
experience here.
Lowell: Well, I knew quite a bit about mining by the time I graduated from
university, but some of my classmates also did.
Swent: I think we ve come to a good place to stop here for lunch. You re
pretty well through college now.
Lowell: Yes.
[tape interruption]
Life as a Married Student
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell :
We re in business again after taking a little lunch break. Was
there anything else you wanted to fill in now?
I might talk a little bit about our family life the last year in
college .
All right,
digs.
That s good. You presumably moved out of the bachelor
Right. After we were married, we rented an apartment that was a
converted garage the few months from March to June of 19A8. When
we came back from Mexico at the end of the summer, a friend of
mine who had been a close friend of my brother s, Chuck Bagby, and
his wife had been living in a small apartment on the south side of
Tucson, which was pretty modest but much better than our garage
apartment, and we were able to take over the Bagbys apartment.
We paid twenty- five dollars a month rent [chuckles). We bought a
car, which was a old Model-A Ford that we named Limonsilla, after
the famous mule. It frequently broke down. At the end of the
year, when I graduated from college, we were able to buy a surplus
red jeep, World War II jeep, that one of the university professors
had.
How much did you pay for it? Do you remember?
We paid $215, which seemed like an impossible financing problem
[laughs], and we had to get a bank loan to do it. The banker was
very dubious about our situation, but I guess because I had my
university degree, he thought he could risk it.
34
Swent : You said Edith was working at the university?
Lowell: Yes. She had a job as a secretary the last year. That was the
largest single source of funding for our enterprise. When I
graduated, I looked around for a job and was given a job by Asarco
in Mexico, but there was a delay of several months for a work
permit to work in Mexico. 1 had a construction job in Tucson for
a month or two, and then my same guardian angel, Dean Chapman, got
me a job as sort of a low-grade consultant for a fellow that had a
mineral prospect near Prescott, Arizona. This fellow was named
Port B. Mellinger. He was a very flamboyant fellow who was in the
baby chick business back in the Middle West. He seemed to have
quite a bit of money and was the owner of this mineral prospect,
which was of dubious value, but it required tidying up to get a
clearer idea of what it was worth. So we took our red jeep and
drove to near Bagdad, Arizona, which was outside of Prescott. I
worked for about six weeks on this prospect, and we lived in an
old shack in a kind of a ghost town place with no electricity or
water or gas or any of those things [chuckles], and had a very
happy time there. There were no other people within several
miles .
Then word came through from Asarco that they had the papers
arranged, and we drove our jeep down to El Paso and then down to
Chihuahua City. The mining camp then was called Santa Eulalia
unit of Asarco. I ve never been able to pronounce that name.
35
IV MINE ENGINEER FOR ASARCO IN MEXICO, 1949 TO 1951
Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua
Swent : Who were you talking to at Asarco? Who hired you?
Lowell: I guess the fellow that hired me was A. A. Brown, who was I
believe vice president in charge of the Mexico division.
Swent: Where was he?
Lowell: He was in El Paso.
Swent: You had to go there?
Lowell: Yes, I went there shortly after I graduated. It was my second
ride in a commercial airliner. The mine manager s name was Syner.
And the mine superintendent s name was Fritz Hertzel. We stayed
two years at that camp. Susie was born in Chihuahua City, and we
had our first Springer spaniel, whose name was also Spook. One of
the principal recreations that we found was going duck hunting on
Sunday on the Concha River. I worked six days a week and worked
an average of nine or ten hours a day.
Swent: What was your job?
Lowell: Well, my job originally was as a mine engineer. I did surveying
and monthly production reports and that sort of thing. And at the
end of the first year, I was given a promotion and I first became
a sort of a shift boss in the Buena Tierra Mine and when I was a
shift boss, a mine foreman was on the shift with me. Then I was
promoted to be night foreman, and I was in charge of the second
and third shifts in the mine.
36
Shift Boss, Mine Foreman, the Buena Tierra Mine
Swent : Tell us more about the mine.
Lowell: Well, the Buena Tierra Mine was a manto type deposit: lead, zinc,
copper, silver were the principal products. It was massive
sulfide ore bodies. The stoping method was open stopes, and some
of the open spaces were very large for a mine. We had a stope
that was 600 feet long and maybe 400 feet wide and over 200 feet
high. That was all open space after the ore body was mined. That
kind of mining is somewhat dangerous because you don t know when
rock turns loose on the top, and so it s dangerous to walk across
the floor of the stope, and so most of the mining was done in the
walls .
Swent: What safety record did they have? A lot of accidents?
Lowell: No, not an unreasonable number. There was a fellow killed while I
was there, in a mud rush. He was loading ore cars from the chute,
and water had gotten into the chute and had sort of fluidized the
rock, and it rushed out through the ore chute and smothered him.
The mine was quite deep. It was 2,500 feet below the surface.
And very hot, very uncomfortable. There was kind of a continuing
problem of bad air because of inadequate mine ventilation.
A Close Call with Bad Air
Lowell: I came very close to being killed because of bad air. On one
occasion, I climbed up a raise to a sub-level, and I was by
myself, and I was supposed to look at something on the sub-level,
and I climbed something like eighty feet of ladders and started
off on the sub-level, and I noticed that the flame in my carbide
light had suddenly moved way out from the reflector. It was still
burning, but it was a long ways out. I tumbled it took me a
second to understand that, and then I tumbled to the fact that
there was a shortage of oxygen. And so I turned around and went
right back to the ladder and started down. I had gotten down a
couple of steps, a couple of rungs, and felt myself passing out.
I stuck my arms through the ladder so that there was rock wall on
one side and ladder on the other side, and I passed out and was
unconscious there for an unknown period of time. But eventually
recovered consciousness. But I was using a carbide light, and it
had fallen down the raise, and so I had to pick my way down in the
dark, and I was lucky enough to find it in a muckpile at the
37
bottom of the ladder, and was able to get it started again, and
there was no real harm done.
I think if you stand up you can see that old carbide light
in my lamp collection is the one that fell down the raise.
[tape interruption]
Swent : We just stopped to see Manuel riding up on his horse.
So that was a very close call then, wasn t it?
Lowell: Yes. And there were some other things like that that happened
while I was there.
Swent: What was the level of concern on the part of management about
these things?
Lowell: [chuckles] Not very much! It was kind of "salvase quien pueda."
Swent: "Save yourself if you can."
Lowell: I was surveying once and sent an engineer s helper up into a mine
working, and I was running a transit, and he keeled over because
of bad air, but was in sight of us. We couldn t see any way to
get him out without the same thing happening to one of us. I
forget what happened. We rigged up the ladder or something and a
rope. His name was Juanito. Finally got him out, and the doctor
came down in the mine, and he was unconscious for an hour but
didn t do any permanent damage.
One of the mine foremen that we knew quite well--his name
was Jack Pearson--was almost killed also when we were there. A
rock came down out of a plugged drawpoint and hit him on the head
so hard that it split his hard hat in two pieces [chuckles].
Swent : Oh , my !
Lowell: One of the fellows that I worked with was an English mining
engineer whose name was Hugh Clayton, who is still a good friend
of ours that we have visited back and forth over the years. Hugh
was never a foreman. He was an engineer. On one occasion, he was
picking his way down into one of these big stopes, and the
interior ladders that we used were often rope ladders made out of
steel cables and steel rungs, and Hugh thought that he was going
down a winze from one level to another, and the ladder was
swinging kind of freely, and he finally got to a point where he
couldn t find another rung with his foot. He was feeling in the
dark down to another rung. So he got set and got his light free,
38
and shined around, and he was dangling down in the middle of one
of these very large open stopes, just in space [laughs].
Swent: Oh, my!
Lowell: Well, there are endless stories of that sort around.
Swent: What sort of safety equipment or clothing did you have? You
mentioned the hard hat.
Lowell: That was about the end of it . I think we had boots that were made
locally, and I think they had a steel cap, steel toe caps, but we
didn t really use any other safety equipment.
Swent: No safety glasses?
Lowell: No.
Swent: Respirators or anything like that?
Lowell: None of that stuff [chuckles].
Swent: Were you given instruction in safety?
Lowell: No.
Swent: Just the ideas you had.
Lowell: Yes. Typically, a new fellow of course went around with somebody
else for a few days to get started.
Swent: What about your health care?
Lowell: They had a hospital and a couple of Mexican doctors. I thought
the medical care was reasonably good.
Social Life
Lowell: The principal recreation in the mining camp was playing cards.
Swent: What did you play?
Lowell: Well, we played mostly poker and canasta [said with Spanish
pronunciation, cah-NAH-stah] . The men played poker, and the women
played canasta. Bridge had been outlawed, much as poison gas was
outlawed by the international authorities as being [chuckles] too
39
dangerous an activity. They had had, I think, fistfights and
whatnot [laughs] at bridge games.
Swent : Was there social life with Mexicans as well as Americans?
Lowell: Yes. It was basically an American-Canadian-British camp, but
there were Mexican engineers and professionals also. As it
happened, our best friends were a Mexican couple. Romeo
[pronounced Row-MAY-oh] was a mining engineer, and Muli, a young
bride living in the camp. Muli is a nickname for Emilia. And
their last name was Ayub, A-y-u-b. The family was originally
Syrian or Pakistani or something that part of the world. We went
by to see Muli about a year ago. Romeo died some time ago. He
had left Asarco and was in business for himself. But one of their
children is something like president of the Mining Association of
Mexico, and they ve done very well.
Swent: What about drinking in the mining camp at Santa Eulalia?
Lowell: It was really not a problem.
Lowell: There was a fair amount of drinking done, drinks served, oh, with
entertainment. There was a book club in the camp and once a year
there was a "literature party." This was the only traditionally
heavy drinking social occasion.
Swent: What did you drink?
Lowell: We drank beer, not very much wine.
Swent: Mexican beer, I suppose?
Lowell: Mexican beer and bourbon. I don t remember very many tequila
drinks, but there probably were some.
Swent : Rum?
Lowell: And rum. But it wasn t really a problem or too large a part of
life there.
Swent: What sort of social occasions did you have?
Lowell: Well, we had kind of regular weekly card parties and entertainment
back and forth between houses. We were at the bottom of the
ladder as far as status goes, I being a recent graduate. We had
an apartment, as did the Ayubs. We invited people over to dinner
and were invited to dinner. Hugh Clayton, who was a bachelor at
40
Swent :
Lowell:
that time, was given the added job of being in charge of the
hotel, where he lived. He had to go to town to shop for the week
for the hotel. There was a cook, I guess.
Edith drove our jeep to town, and I usually, but not always,
went along with her. The road was very bad going down the
mountain, and it was kind of exciting.
How far was it?
It was about twenty miles. Edith became famous after hitting a
large pig with our jeep. It didn t seem to hurt the pig.
Recollections of Pancho Villa in Chihuahua
Swent: This is Chihuahua.
Lowell: Chihuahua City. Part of the time she rode to Chihuahua with a
taxi driver whose name was Pepe. Pancho Villa had come through
Chihuahua, and Pepe s father had been hung from a power pole in
Santa Eulalia by Pancho Villa. The old-timers there told us about
hiding in the mine when the revolutionaries came through.
Swent: That wasn t too long ago; twenty years or so?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: No, more like thirty or forty years ago, I guess.
Lowell: That s right. Pancho Villa was kind of in the 1915, 20, thirty
years before we were there.
Swent: But still within living memory.
Lowell: Well, 20 to 49. That s about thirty years. No, not that long.
It was hard to find anybody that had anything good to say about
Pancho Villa there.
Swent: He wasn t a hero to those people, was he? No. Pershing was one
of the people whowasn t Pershing sent down by the U.S. Army to--
Lowell: I guess that s right.
Swent: --fight Pancho Villa?
41
Lowell: Yes, I think that s right because Pershing died just about the
beginning of the Second World War.
Swent: That makes those things come alive, doesn t it?
Lowell: It does.
Housing
Swent: You say you were in an apartment. What sort of housing did you
have?
Lowell: Well, it was built out of--it was sort of austere but adequate.
Swent: Adobe?
Lowell: I kind of think it was stone and concrete. I think that s what it
was. It had a small living room and a bedroom and a kitchen and
dining room. I think it was basically a three-room apartment.
Swent: Electricity?
Lowell: Electricity.
Swent: Enough for appliances?
Lowell: Yes. It was completely furnished, so it was Asarco appliances.
Swent: I was wondering what sort of stove you had.
Lowell: I think it was a gas stove.
Asarco, a Tight Company
Lowell: Asarco is famous for being a tight company. One of the features
in our apartment was a spring-loaded hot water tap so there was no
chance that they were going to heat water that was left running.
In the engineering office--! still have one somewhere they
furnished pencil extenders so that when the pencil got down to two
inches long, you sharpened the other end and screwed it into the
extender so that you could use the rest of it. [laughter]
Swent: How much were you paid?
42
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell;
Swent:
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell ;
Swent :
I was paid $250 a month, and got ,1 raise to ;,>285 after a year.
In Mexico?
It was U.S. dollars. I don t remember that I paid very much tax. I
think I paid U.S. income tax, but percentage-wise it was pretty low.
And your health care was included?
It was included.
Rent?
Rent was included, and utilities. We didn t have a telephone, but
there was a phone in the office, but it was pretty much an
interior telephone system. We couldn t call home on the phone.
We got two weeks a year of vacation. One fellow that we got
acquainted with, who was a young engineer he was probably ten
years older than I--his name was Ham Bush, who was running a
relatively small mine for Asarco over near Presidio, Texas. He
reported to the mine manager at Santa Eulalia. He wasn t given a
great deal of appreciation or cooperation or support. This is
just a story to illustrate the Asarco mentality.
And he came in and talked to Mr. Syner. They talked about
his problems and that he wanted a raise, and they wouldn t give
him a raise, and so Ham said, "Well, I ve been thinking a lot
about this, and I m afraid I m just going to have to resign. But
I do have three weeks of vacation due, and I assume you ll pay me
for the vacation." Ham told me that Mr. Syner laughed and laughed
and just slapped his leg [laughs] at the thought that somebody was
going to get paid for vacation when he quit.
So it wasn t a paternalistic organization like companies now
are .
;
No, times have changed. You said the English-speaking group
included people other than Americans, though, didn t you?
Yes.
How large a colony was it? How many people were there?
See Simon David Strauss, "Market Analyst for Non-Ferrous Metals and
Non-Metallic Minerals, Journalist, Mining Corporation Executive, 1927-1994,"
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, 1995.
Lowell: Well, in terms of staff members, I suppose there were maybe
twenty-five or thirty, plus families.
Swent : Was there a school?
Lowell: Yes. There was an English school, sort of a one-room type of
school, taught by either one of the wives or an imported
schoolteacher. I think they brought in a schoolteacher. At the
end of eight years, it was pretty much understood that you had to
go away to boarding school.
Swent: Did Edith have help?
Lowell: No. She had somebody named Basilia come in to help with the baby.
Swent: She didn t have a maid.
Lowell: No. The people with more status that had individual houses all
had maids. We really didn t have any complaint about that. We
were perfectly happy. Edith since that time has had maids and
feels they re a mixed blessing. She s not very enthusiastic about
having people underfoot.
We got our milk from a fellow that delivered milk in cans on
a burro. The first thing you did with your milk when you got it
was boil it because you were pretty sure that it wasn t very pure.
This milkman, whose name I don t remember, was in a category in
Mexico of whom I ve met three. His problem was that he killed
people. But he did it when he was drinking, and Mexican law
protects a drunken man. He had killed, I believe, twelve people,
and the last one occurred while we were there. During that
period, his little boy had to deliver the milk. He was in jail
for a couple of months, and then they let him go. On one
occasion, one of the ladies saw this milkman adding water to one
of his cans of milk out of a garden hose at one of the houses.
But no one was about to criticize him. [laughter]
Some of the people at camp were well educated. The
geologist, the resident geologist had a Ph.D. from Columbia.
Swent: What was his name?
Lowell: Bill Hewitt. There was a geologist named Severn Brown working on
a dissertation there, who was getting a Ph.D. He s a fellow that
we ve since gotten well acquainted with long after the Santa
Eulalia years.
There was a Howe-Sound Mining Company mine that wa ;
contiguous their mine was in the same ore body as the Asarco one
at Buena Tierra Mine. They also had a little camp that was very
close by, like a quarter of a mile away. They added to the
parties and entertainment. The manager s name was Martin
[pronounced Mar-TEEN] Nesbitt. He was born in Mexico. 1 think
his father had been a British mining engineer. A very nice guy.
There wasn t very much effort made to be diplomatic between
supervisors and junior engineers and shift bosses and people like
I was [chuckles]. Fritz Hertzel was a particularly tough, kind of
mean guy. His nickname with the miners was El Camaron. And if
you thought about it and looked at him, he was a little hunched
over. He looked a little bit like a big shrimp [chuckles]. There
was a Mexican foreman whose name was Macias, whose nickname was La
Bestia [laughs]. I think those may have been the only two
nicknames that I heard.
Finally, I was working very hard. I used to come out of the
minewe usually got a chance to come out for lunch and go back in
and worked nine hours underground altogether. The mine was so hot
that when I would change my clothes, I would pour half a pint of
sweat out of my boots [chuckles] every time I was underground. It
was pretty tough work.
Lessons Learned: Supervision, Record Keeping, Mine Surveying
Swent : What did you gain from the experience?
Lowell: Well, it was really my first opportunity to be a boss of anything,
and I learned something about supervision. I had sixty-five men
working for me a good part of the time 1 was there. I learned
more about underground mining and quite a bit about record-keeping
for operating a mine.
Swent: Were the people working under you all Mexicans?
Lowell: Yes. I did some pretty complex surveying jobs. Mine surveying,
as you probably know, is rather more difficult than surveying out
in the open.
Swent: What makes it different?
Lowell: Well, carrying azimuths underground, you have to hang wires, with
a weight and a bucket of oil on the bottom, and line two wires up
and determine as precisely as possible what the azimuth between
them is at the surface, when you go down and pick up the same
azimuth underground.
Now, in the last ten years, they ve developed some
electronic ways to do that, that gets around the old plumbing-the-
shaft type of surveying. But the basic difference is that you re
surveying very much in three dimensions underground, and on the
surface it s two dimensions with relatively minor, mild vertical
angles. Underground, you might go this way [demonstrating] and so
on.
Swent: Lots of different angles. Has that been useful to you?
Lowell: Yes, probably to a limited degree, but I think the human mind
profits by being exercised, and you kind of learn how to do
things, and if you have learned how to do several different
things, you re more likely to be able to do something new.
Swent: Sometimes you learn what you don t like to do also.
Lowell: Yes. And that was basically the case in Mexico. In my last year
in the university, I had started to tumble to the fact that I was
really more interested in mineral exploration than I was in raining
production work. After 1 had been there for a year and a half in
Mexico, I started looking around for ways that I could shift into
working as a geologist in mineral exploration.
Swent: How did you go about that?
Lowell: Well, just inquiries. I resigned having learned from Ham Bush
what the effect was of trying to collect your vacation, I resigned
just after I had finished my vacation [laughs]. And came back to
Arizona and started beating the bushes. Somebody told me that the
Atomic Energy Commission was hiring geologists, and I succeeded in
getting a job with them.
46
V GEOLOGIST FOR THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION, 1951 TO 1954
Manager of Cove School Drilling Camp, Arizona
Swent : How did you get that?
Lowell: How did I get it? I got the name of the fellow who was hiring
people, and I wrote him a letter.
Swent: Who was it?
Lowell: I think his name was J. 0. Jones in Grand Junction, Colorado? I
believe that I went to Grand Junction for an interview. I m sure
I did. I don t remember what it consisted of, but the work that
we were doing for the Atomic Energy Commission was looking for
red-bed type uranium deposits in the Morrison formation in the
Colorado Plateau. The basic game plan wasn t necessarily a very
efficient way to find uranium reserves, but the Atomic Energy
Commission jumped right into the mineral exploration. They didn t
subsidize private companies that might have done it better, but
they did it themselves.
Swent: What year?
Lowell: This was 1951. Let s see. Yes, this was sometime like in June of
1951.
The whole group that they had doing this work had been hired
at almost the same time. The majority of them were recent
graduate geologists from the East. I within a few months
gravitated to a job as manager of a drilling camp with several
other geologists reporting to me.
Swent: Do you remember some names?
Lowell: Yes. There was a really nice guy whose name was Bob Rock, who was
a Colorado School of Mines graduate. There was a fellow named Nog
Yeater, who was from Texas. There was a fellow named Louie
Roberts from Columbia University. I had a non-graduate sort of
technician whose name was Johnny Epic, who had been a Navajo
Indian trader and spoke Navajo. And I had a Navajo Indian whose
name was Elwood Sosie, who had been in Merrill s Raiders in the
war in the Pacific, as a code-talker. One of the geologists was
John Blagburough and we had an engineer named Carl Applin.
Swent: Oh, yes.
Lowell: My memory kind of runs out. There were a couple of others.
A good part of my term with the Atomic Energy Commission was
in a camp that was called Cove School. It was a abandoned Navajo
day school in the Lukachukai Mountains, near the Four Corners
area. Near Red Rock Trading Post in New Mexico. The nearest town
to us was Shiprock, New Mexico. We carried out a number of
diamond drilling projects. There was a drill contractor that had
a crew in the camp with us. Altogether, there were probably
twenty house trailers.
Swent: Was your family there with you?
Lowell: At that time, Edith and Susie and Spook, the Springer spaniel. We
had bought a house trailer, a used twenty-nine- foot house trailer,
which we brought in ourselves. Most of the others were living in
smaller government trailers, and I think they had to pay rent on
their trailers, so we kind of broke even. But ours was larger and
somewhat more luxurious, although that s the wrong word
[chuckles] .
Swent: Relative term.
Lowell: We had a little interior shower, toilet stall, which was about as
big as this table from here [demonstrating] over there.
Swent: About three feet square?
Lowell: But it was much better than having to go down to the Navajo school
to use the showers there. I succeeded in tapping into a running
water supply that the drill contractor had, with a garden hose. I
suspended a fifty-five-gallon drum of water in a juniper tree so
we had running watereven hot water from a little electric water
heater!
**
Swent: You had this hose going up in the can in the juniper tree?
48
Lowell: Yes, the hose was in a sort of under-the-counter-way hooked into
the contractor s water line, and I suspended the barrel in the
juniper tree, and could fill it by opening the faucet. That in
one fell swoop gave us running water in our trailer, and we were
able to have hot showers in our little shower enclosure. But our
trailer was a second-hand kind of banged-up trailer. It had some
kind of electrical short in it. We occasionally felt a little
shock stepping into [chuckles] the trailer, but didn t think very
much about it, but it was very worrisome for Spook, the Springer
spaniel. He [chuckles) got in the habit of gathering himself
together several feet away from the trailer door, making a great
leap [laughter] so as not to form a continuous contact from the
damp ground.
That was a very pleasant interlude for us and maybe the
single most enjoyable period in my life.
Swent : How long were you there?
Lowell: Oh, about one and a half or two years, I guess.
Swent: Over different seasons, then.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: You were healthy?
Lowell: Everybody was healthy. We sometimes learned of a Navajo squaw
dance that was going on. They re three-day affairs. Part of it
is out in the woods with a bonfire and drums, and they dance all
night. We would drive our jeep up and sit on the ground with the
Indians, watching the dance.
Swent: You have some nice Navajo blankets.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Did you get some of those then?
Lowell: Yes. I often stopped in trading posts to look at rugs when I was
driving across the reservation. They re mostly wearing out now.
Edith s grandfather had a collection that she inherited part of
that are quite old. Some of those are more than a hundred years
old. But we had a lot of entertainment in the camp. Everybody
was about the same age and all kind of felt like it was all sort
of an adventure living up in the mountains.
Swent: It was an exciting time, I m sure. How much were you paid?
Lowell: I was paid about twice as much as Asarco had paid me [chuckles].
I don t remember exactly. I think it was something like four or
five hundred dollars a month, and I got several promotions and
raises later. Back in those days, one expression that was often
heard was "ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man." Do you remember
hearing that?
Swent : That s right, yes.
Lowell: And so four or five hundred wasn t all that shabby. That was like
[chuckles) a f ive-thousand-dollar-a-year man. When I left the AEC
in 1954 I had a GS11 rating, which was a middle-management
government rating.
Swent: And your expenses were rather low, I imagine.
Lowell: Yes. Oh, one of the fellows overlapped with us for a while in the
camp was Leo Miller, Leo and Julie Miller. Leo has since become a
rather famous exploration geologist. He is largely given the
credit for the discovery of the Kidd Creek Mine in Canada and one
of the phosphate deposits in--I think it s in North Carolina. Leo
is a real character, but when Leo and Julie were towing their
trailer into Cove School, they stopped in Shiprock and were
approached by somebody that was a derelict type and was stuck
there without any money and hungry. Leo gave him all the money
that he had, which was five dollars, and Julie said, "Leo, that s
all the money you have." And he said, "Well, we ve got enough
groceries for two weeks, and he needed it worse than I did."
[chuckles] But that s the sort of atmosphere.
District Manager, Holbrook, Arizona
Lowell: We moved from Cove School to White Canyon, Utah, which was
another, similar camp near the Colorado River and were there for
six or eight months. Then I was given a job in charge of the
whole district covering the Navajo Indian Reservation District.
We initially moved to Cameron, Arizona, which was a trading post,
and then to Holbrook, Arizona, where we had a duplex house which
seemed like the height of luxury compared with a house trailer.
Swent: What did you do with the trailer?
Lowell: We sold it.
Swent: That was a real step up.
50
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Holbrook was a big AEC place at that time, wasn t it? Was there
an ore buying station there?
Lowell: No. Where was that? I know there was an ore buying station, but
I don t remember where. But it was somewhere in that vicinity.
Swent: Tuba City, I guess.
Lowell: Yes, Tuba City. And there was some kind of a concentrator there
also .
Swent: There was a lot of activity around that area.
Lowell: But in Holbrook was a group of USGS geologists. It was called the
Navajo Groundwater Project. One of them had been a professor of
mine in the College of Mines, John Harshbarger, who became very
famous in the groundwater business in North and South America, and
he worked all over the world, principally finding water supplies
in arid districts.
Another fellow that we became very well acquainted with and
has since been one of our best friends is Charles Repenning. He s
the one that made these plaster casts, fossil casts.
Swent: Let s tell what fossil casts.
Lowell: Oh. In the cabinet behind you are fossil casts of an
Australopithecus skull and a Heidelberg Man jaw. Charles
Repenning, who is known as Rep Repenning, was probably the number
one vertebrate paleontologist in the geological survey and one of
the handful of most famous in the world. We have visited with Rep
and earlier with his family for many years. He now lives in
Denver, Colorado. He is retired from the USGS but working as a
paleontological consultant.
Swent: You make awfully good friends in a place like Holbrook, don t you?
Lowell: Yes. Holbrook, in my opinion, is one of the ugliest towns in
Arizona, maybe the ugliest [chuckles].
Swent: Railroad originally, wasn t it?
Lowell: Yes, yes, and still is, probably. It s a predominantly Mormon
town and somehow or other the religion aspect is a particular
problem in Holbrook because the Mormons have become kind of
clannish and not open to being friendly with outsiders. But
51
because of our good luck in finding two or three friends there, it
was a very happy time for us.
While I was in Holbrook--! had finally decided--! had been
thinking about this for a year or two before, which was going back
to graduate school. I was working as a geologist but didn t have
a geology degree. With the help of one of my professors from
University of Arizona, Eddie McKee, 1 was able to get into the
graduate school in the Department of Geosciences at Stanford
University.
Study of Mapping Fossil Stream Direction
Swent : How did he help you?
Lowell: Well, by giving me a recommendation. For no particular reason, I
had initiated at Cove School a study of mapping of fossil stream
direction indicators: cross-bedding and ripple marks and
lineation. This was used as an aid in finding uranium deposits.
Swent: You did a paper on that. 1
Lowell: That s right.
Swent: Is that one of your first papers?
Lowell: 1 think that was the first paper. Eddie McKee was kind enough to
act as--he was a sedimentationist , and he was kind enough to act
as advisor and critic on the paper.
Swent: I had a question about that, too. You had mentioned--! guess it
was Bob Rock that you mentioned here earlier, and John Masters?
Lowell: Yes. Well, John Masters was a fellow that spent some time in
Lukachukai camp. He was not in my group. He was independent of
my group and in a mapping group.
Swent: He did work with you to some extent on this cross-bedding paper?
Lowell: No.
David Lowell, "Applications of Cross-Stratification Studies to
Problems of Uranium Exploration, Chuska Mountains, Arizona." Economic
Geology, March-April 1955, vol. 50, #2, pp. 177-185.
52
Swept :
Lowell;
His name came up in it for something,
names: Masters and Rock.
You had mentioned these two
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell ;
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
The AEC was organized into two divisions. The one was something
like the drilling division, which was sort of a production,
physical exploration division. And the other division was called
the mapping division. Their function was to do district and
regional geologic mapping to support the exploration. John
Masters was working in the mapping division, and I was working in
the drilling division. We were in the same camp but independent
of each other. Leo Miller was also in this mapping division. I
don t remember why Masters was mentioned, but maybe in connection
with using the base geologic map that he had made.
Here we are. [reading from paper] The paper was called "The
Applications of Cross-Stratification Studies to Problems of
Uranium Exploration in the Chuska Mountains," right?
Yes.
And it was in Economic Geology, Volume 50, Number II. You
acknowledged the help of E. D. McKee and W. L. Stokes. McKee was
your teacher from Arizona.
Yes. And Stokes was a college professor at the University of
Utah.
And he had done studies of the Morrison formation, which inspired
your paper. And then you said that it was based on field data
collected by R. L. Rock and J. A. Masters.
Well, the geologic base map was probably made by Masters and some
of the stream directions mapped by Bob Rock.
That was in here, I think in your abstract, perhaps. [Reading]:
"Ancient stream directions may be reconstructed through use of
cross-stratification," but you had said "field data."
Well, my recollection is pretty hazy, but I did some of the cross-
stratification mapping and Bob Rock did part. My time was limited
because I was also managing the whole program of road construction
and drilling with up to six drill rigs.
Bob Rock was working for me, and John Masters was not at
that time. He was in this other program.
Swent: What sort of field data would you base a paper like this on?
53
Lowell: Just systematic mapping of cross-stratification structures in
outcrops. I think the actual cross-stratification mapping was
done by Bob Rock and myself. The mapping that Masters did was
more regional, geologic mapping, not cross-stratification. And
there was geologic work being done by many different people.
Swent: It must have taken a lot of discipline to get all this together
and to get a paper published in Economic Geology at that time,
when you were so busy out in the field.
Lowell: Well, it s partly a search for glory [chuckles] to get a first
publication to help you in your career and so on.
Edith Lowell s Help in Editing
Swent: Did Edith play any part in encouraging you to do this? Helping
you?
Lowell: Yes, she definitely did. She didn t get involved very much with
the geology, although she had a geology minor at the university.
But she was helpful in editing and that sort of thing. Edith was
a Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi scholar in college, in contrast
to my trying to reach the minimum grade point average [chuckles]
to graduate. She got a degree in anthropology, with, 1 think,
split minors in Spanish and geology. At the time I started off in
the consulting business, she went back to school to get a teaching
certificate so she could get a job as a schoolteacher. That
evolved into a master s degree in Spanish. She has quite a bit of
academic background also.
Swent: When did she she did that after your time at Stanford, I guess.
Lowell: Yes. It was around 1970 or 71.
Swent: I see. We re still back in 1954, getting you to Stanford. So
your contact with McKee, thenthrough the years, you stayed in
touch.
Lowell: That s right. Edith had also been a student of McKee at
University of Arizona. We knew his family also. But anyway, I
got accepted at Stanford.
54
VI GRADUATE STUDY AT STANFORD, 1954 TO 1955
Shifting from Mining Engineering to Geology a Problem
Swent :
Why Stanford?
Lowell: Well, the main reason was that Eddie McKee told me to go to
Stanford [laughs]. I was alsothere was a professor at the
University of Minnesota by the name of John Gruner, who was one of
our consultants in the AEC, and I worked with Dr. Gruner. He
offered me a fellowship at Minnesota to get a Ph.D. I seriously
considered that and talked to people about the climate, which
seemed kind of awful [chuckles]. It was also the subject seemed
a little bit more academic thanI have always been interested in
applied science but not much in pure science. Anyway, I didn t
take Dr. Gruner s offer.
Swent: How did you meet him?
Lowell: Working with him at AEC.
Swent: What do you mean "working with him"?
Lowell: Well, he came in as advisor in some of these geologic techniques,
and I spent a number of days in the field with him and made little
trips and so forth. He decided that he could use me as an
assistant at the University of Minnesota.
Swent: What sort of science did he want you to pursue?
Lowell: Well, his program was geology but more in the area of structural
geology. It was partly lack of understanding on my part. I have
since decided that one Ph.D. is probably about as good as another,
that it s more going through the exercise of studying courses and
so forth, rather than actually using the graduate education as a
basis for doing jobs afterwards; it s more of an exercise than a
cookbook qualification, in my opinion.
55
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
Anyway, didn t go to Minnesota. Did go to Stanford. And
was too optimistic about my financial capability--! didn t have a
fellowship at Stanford. I got a little bit of fellowship money
once or twice, but it wasn t significant. I had been over-
optimistic in thinking that the money I had saved would carry me
through three years for a Ph.D., and I actually stayed as a
resident student for only one year there.
I had the other problem of shifting from mining engineering
to geology, and I lacked some prerequisite courses, and was also
thrown in with real professional students who knew exactly how to
get good grades and study and all those things.
Of course, you had a wife and two children, too.
Yes. I really had an unpleasant time at Stanford. I got fairly
good grades, but I had to work like a Trojan. I worked fourteen
hours a day six days a week and then something like six or eight
hours on Sunday [chuckles]. At the end of one year, I had gotten
the language requirements for the Ph.D., but still lacked course
work.
What were you taking that year?
1 was taking an ore deposits course, basically, and I took
advanced mineralogy and petrology and paleontology, which I
never had.
had
Paleontology Professor Simon Wilhelm Muller
Swent: Who were your teachers?
**
Lowell: The ore deposits teacher was Charles Park. My advisor was George
Thompson, who was a geophysicist and structural geologist. The
individual professor that 1 was most taken with was the
paleontology professor, whose name was Simon Wilhelm Muller. Dr.
Muller was a Russian who had escaped from Russia during the
Russian Revolution. He felt that Stanfordian students were too
conventional and obedient and methodical, and they were not
discriminating because they were, by definition, expert students
but not necessarily thinkers.
This is the first and only time I ve heard of somebody
teaching a course this way, but he at the beginning said, "I want
56
you to understand that some of the things in my lectures are going
to be true and some are going to be false, and it s up to you to
discriminate and evaluate this information." This horrified
[chuckles] most of the graduate students, who had never run into
this problem before. But it just fit with my approach to life,
and so I was maybe the top student in that particular class.
Dr. Muller talked to me afterwards and tried to talk me into
taking a job as a professor in one of the Oregon schools-
University of Oregon or Oregon State University, one of them.
Which is also the first and only time that anyone has had the
remotest idea that I could be a university professor [chuckles].
Swent : What was different about your background, I wonder, that would
make you outstanding in that class as opposed to other people?
Lowell: Well, I think I owe it to my angel mother, who convinced me at an
early age that I was almost always wrong and bad [laughs].
Swent: You had to prove her wrong?
Lowell: I had become accustomed a long time before being criticized and
frowned at, so it didn t bother me at all telling Dr. Muller, "I
don t believe that A, B, and C are not true."
Swent: And he liked that.
Lowell: He liked that. The whole course was kind of a game.
I had courses from Bob Compton, who was a slightly famous
petrologist, and Colin Osborne Hutton, who was a New Zealander who
was a genuinely famous mineralogist. I was thrown in over my head
in both of those courses because the Stanford catalog wasn t
really clear on what the prerequisites were. But I managed to
survive both courses.
Dr. Hutton was a New Zealander with a heavy New Zealand
accent, and 1 couldn t understand him. 1 thought he was from some
southern European country [laughs] for the first few days. That s
about all of the--
Swent : Where were you living?
Lowell: Well, we lived in Menlo Park in a house. That is, not a duplex.
And very comfortable. It was a blue-collar neighborhood. Our
next-door neighbor was a truck driver. He had a daughter about
the same age as Susie. One of the stories that came back to me
was this little girl said to Susie, "My father went to school,
57
too, when he was a boy." [laughter] They couldn t understand why
a grown man would be going to school [chuckles].
Our second child, Bill, was born while I was working for the
AEC. He was born in Tucson. Edith s parents were living in
Tucson. She came down and stayed for a while in Tucson.
Swent: What was this child s name?
Lowell: William David Lowell.
Swent: And Susie s name is?
Lowell: Susan Deborah Lowell.
Swent: And this boy is called Bill?
Lowell: Bill.
Swent: And he was born in Tucson.
Lowell: Born in Tucson.
Swent: And what was the date?
Lowell: Well, I happen to have that [going through papers],
Swent: All right [laughs]. I m not sure I got the exact date of Susan s
birth, either.
Lowell: Well, Susan s birthdate is October 27, 1950. And Bill s birthdate
is April 18, 1952.
Swent: Paul Revere day, just about.
Lowell: And Doug s birthdate is June 6, 1956.
Swent: That was after you were out of Stanford.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: So by now you had two children, at Stanford.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: I don t need to ask what Edith was doing with her days.
Lowell: Well, she really couldn t get a job. She didn t have--
58
Swent: She had a job! [chuckles]
Lowell: As I said, it was kind of a miscalculation of mine. I thought I
could get through a couple of years and really ran out of money at
the end of the first year. I got a job working for a Canadian
mining company whose manager was a fellow that I had met in the
Atomic Energy Commission, Tom Mitchum. The company was called
Ranwick Incorporated and was based in Denver, Colorado. We moved
from--I left Stanford with the understanding that I was going to
write a master s thesis after I left, to complete requirements for
a master s degree, and I did that over the next two years.
59
VII EXPLORATION GEOLOGIST FOR RANWICK, SOUTHWEST VENTURES, UTAH
CONSTRUCTION, 1955 TO 1959
Manager, Menlove-Dalton Uranium Mine, Colorado
Lowell: Ranwick Incorporated had about six geologists. It was an
exploration company. It was looking for uranium deposits and
based in Denver. I was chief geologist and was paid $11,000 a
year which was a very good salary in 1955.
Swent : Edith and the children moved, then, to Denver?
Lowell: Moved to Denver. The way it worked out: she didn t have a chance
to go with me to look for a house, and I did the house hunting
myself in Denver. I found a house on University Boulevard, which
was a remodeled farmhouse in the middle of a large lot. It was
something like an acre of land, all in lawn, and a beautiful
house, well fitted out. It had one flaw, which was that the
garage opened on an alley behind the house, and it was almost
impossible to drive from the alley into our garage [chuckles].
I went back to Palo Alto to get the family, and we drove to
Denver, and I was really feeling proud of this house. I thought,
"Boy, you ve really pulled off a coup here." And Edith took one
look at it, and burst into tears [laughs]. I think it was the
garage that got her more than anything. She finally got kind of
fond of it. We had some friends in Denver. It was a really nice
house.
Swent: You were traveling a lot, I suppose.
Lowell: Yes. At that point, I was traveling most of the time. Ranwick
acquired a uranium deposit which they developed into a mine. It
was called the Menlove-Dalton Mine. It was in southeastern Utah.
I more or less by default became mine manager of the uranium mine
because I was the only one in the company that knew anything about
60
mining at that point. Ranwick was a subsidiary of Ventures
Limited of Canada.
Swent :
Oh, yes.
Lowell: It had a short, sort of chaotic, turbulent life. The budget was
cut, and Tom Mitchum took a job with Kennecott, and most of the
other geologists were fired.
Swent: What had been the point of setting up a subsidiary?
Lowell: Well, Ventures Limited operated through a large number of
subsidiaries.
Swent: That was Thayer Lindsley?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: He was the head of it all.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: He just liked to have a lot of companies?
Lowell: Well, it was sort of a mechanism for financing new projects. If
it had a new name and a new organization, then it was possible to
sell stock and get public money to finance a new venture. Later I
worked for Ventures subsidiaries for several years, I think four
or five years.
Swent: For different subsidiaries?
Lowell: Yes. At one point, I was back in Toronto, and one of the parent
company officials gave me a brochure of the Venture companies, and
at that time there were 120 subsidiaries. Most of them pretty
dormant, but there were a few, like Falconbridge Nickel, that were
making money and Mclntyre Mines and Compania La India in
Nicaragua. But it was a very unusual company.
Swent: What did you think about this?
Lowell: Well, I didn t have enough background information at that time to
know, to have an intelligent opinion, but it made an interesting
job. I guess I became general manager of Ranwick a year or two
later. We ran out of funds in our bank account, and I called the
Ventures treasurer and asked to have some money transferred, and
he said, "Well, I ll look around. I think there s some money in
one or another of these companies." [chuckles] Then I later read
that Thayer Lindsley was severely criticized by shareholders and
61
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
the Ontario stock securities commission and other people for
moving money from one company to another [chuckles]. He wasn t
doing it for any bad reason. It was just to try to keep
everything going.
The Menlove-Dalton Mine was out in the flats near Dove
Creek, Colorado. It was a mine that almost made it, but never
quite made it, because there wasn t enough ore to support a long-
term mining operation. At one point in spring, and this might
have been the spring of 1956, in the spring thaw--we had two or
three jeeps and a road grader and a bulldozer and a big haul
truck, and one of these got stuck in the mud, and they sent
another one to pull the first one out, and the second one got
stuck, and so on, until our whole rolling fleet [chuckles] were
all stuck in a line in this bottomless mud pit. There were lots
of problems.
We had animal haulage underground, and we had, I think,
three mules, including a lady mule who had been trained to tow ore
cars that had automobile wheels so they would roll easily, and
dump their cars in the ore bin.
This is in the fifties!
mules !
I had no idea they were still using
Anyway, this jenny mule, whose name I used to remember but have
forgotten-
She won t complain. She won t read this and feel bad that you
forgot her name. [laughter]
She backed her car and dumped the ton of ore into the ore bin, but
she backed a little bit too far, and the ore car pulled her into
the ore bin, and there was great excitement. I was a non-resident
manager. I wasn t there much of the time. She was rescued and
pulled out of the ore bin and dusted off and didn t have anything
broken. But mules are very peculiar animals, and she decided,
"That s it. No more animal haulage for me." And she wouldn t
ever pull her car again after that, [laughs]
Stubborn as a mule.
Eventually, the Menlove-Dalton Mine slowed down to a stop. In the
meantime, I had found a copper prospect for the company at Copper
Basin, Arizona, near Prescott. The budget had shrunk by this
time, and we moved to Prescott, and I did a careful study of the
district and eventually wrote an article which--! was joint author
with Bill Johnson, who had written a dissertation on the Copper
Basin district.
62
Swent: How was the article different? What did you contribute to the
article that was different from his dissertation?
Lowell: I had done more work than Bill and had done drilling, had managed
a drilling project and had some additional ideas and so on. He
was the senior author.
Swent: That was in Economic Geology?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: Okay. Meanwhile, you re also working on your thesis.
Lowell: Yes, but by that point I had gotten it approved and had my
master s degree. I don t think I went back to Stanford--! don t
remember whether I went back to the graduation ceremony.
Swent: What was your thesis?
Lowell: Well, the thesis was basically on the geology of the Menlove-
Dalton uranium deposit and the mineral district it was in.
Swent: Do you recall the title?
Lowell: No, I don t. It wasn t a great contribution to science, I can
tell you that [chuckles],
Swent: What was special about the geology there?
Lowell: Well, nothing particularly, it was a sediment hosted oxidized
uranium deposit, but I jumped through all the hoops for a thesis.
Some of my other publications I think have been contributions to
science, but that one wasn t.
Swent: But they come step by step.
Vice President, Southwest Ventures. Inc.
Lowell: Yes. Ventures had another subsidiary that had been working
largely in Mexico that was called Southwest Ventures,
Incorporated. They told me they were going to fold up Ranwick and
make me vice president of Southwest Ventures, so I just changed
the letterhead and went on with pretty much the same job, but we
moved from Prescott to Tucson. Edith felt very strongly about her
roots in southern Arizona, and she was overjoyed.
63
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell
Swent:
Lowell
We moved to Tucson and rented a house for a year and then
built a fairly modest house. Edith s father and mother had
homesteaded an area in the Catalina foothills north of Tucson.
They still had a good part of this land, some of which they had
given to Edith, and we had this house built on an acre lot and
moved in. I built a swimming pool myself there and did various--
A small open-pit mine?
[laughter] That s right! I had an old friend who was a friend of
my brother s in Tucson, and his name was Brackston Whittaker.
Another fellow and I both built our own home swimming pools at the
same time. We were both friends of Brack Whittaker, and we would
go to him and ask how to do various things [chuckles]. He
finallywe were talking to him at a party once, and he finally
said, "You know what you fellows should do is to get a night job
and save the money and let me build your swimming pools."
[laughs] Which would have been very good advice, but we didn t do
that. I have always been optimistic about being able to do things
and build things.
Working for Southwest Ventures, 1 did quite a bit of work in
Mexico and Arizona and California and New Mexico.
When you say you "did work," what were you doing?
I mainly was examining mineral prospects that were submitted to us
and sometimes making option agreements and carrying out
exploration drilling projects on the prospects.
Were there any that you remember of particular significance?
Well, nothing really came out of that work. We had a joint
venture with Cominco, a large Canadian company, and did work in
the Prescott district, looking for massive sulfide deposits of the
Jerome variety, and found some smells of mineralization but
nothing that came close to a viable deposit. We worked on some
precious metal deposits in Sonora.
Let s see.
War.
What was going on? We haven t mentioned the Korean
Well, skipping back to my days in the University of Arizona, in my
senior year I was in a metallurgy course, in which we did lab
metallurgical projects, and my lab partner was a fellow whose name
was Johnny Ware. He had been in the Second World War in the
Marine Corps and was the captain in charge of the Tucson company
of the Marine Corps active reserves.
64
II
Swent : You were saying that Johnny Ware was in your class, and he had
known your brother.
Lowell: Yes. He had been an officer in the Pacific, in the Marine Corps,
and when he came back to finish his mining degree, he had a part-
time job as commanding officer of the Tucson Marine Corps Active
Reserve company. In the course of chatting in our school work, he
said, "Why don t you join the Marine Corps?" He said, "I can get
you a rating of sergeant in this Marine company, and you will
earn"--I can t remember but I believe it was $15 a week. You had
to drill one day a week [chuckles]. Whatever it was, it sounded
very good to me.
I discussed this with Edith, and she said, "I don t know. I
think that s a bad idea, and I wish you wouldn t do that." And
since I wasn t thoroughly convinced, I said, "Well, I don t think
I will." Then I graduated. Then we went to Mexico, and we were
getting the Tucson newspaper and the Korean War had started. I
was exempt because I was married and had a child. But there was
an article that said that all members of the Tucson Marine Corps
company have been called up and sent to Korea! And fought at the
Chosin Reservoir. I read a book later about the Chosin Reservoir
campaign in the Marine Corps, and it said that a bunch of the
troops were just like this. They were sort of undertrained
reservists that were sent over, and it was freezing cold, and they
were cut off by the Chinese army. I talked to somebody later that
knew about this company, and about a third of them were killed
there [chuckles]. It would have been an awful mistake.
Swent: You had been in ROTC in college.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: But you didn t continue with that.
Lowell: I took two years, which were required, and I didn t take the
second two years to get a commission through the ROTC. I became a
staff sergeant in the two-year stint.
Swent: That s interesting. I was thinking more of what happened to metal
prices and exploration as a result of some of these external
events. There was of course the uranium boom, which you were
involved in, and then there was a copper boom.
Lowell: When I graduated in 1949, it was a depressed period in metals. I
think--! hadn t thought about that, but maybe partly as a result
65
of the Korean War, it went from bust to boom in two or three
years .
Self -Education in Porphyry Copper Geology
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
In the early fifties.
Yes. There began to be quite a large amount of exploration being
done in southern Arizona for copper, beginning probably late in
50. Well, I was kind of involved in that with Southwest
Ventures. We were looking at porphyry copper prospects. During
that period, I began to educate myself on porphyry copper geology.
By 1959, when I left Ventures and went to work for Utah
Construction Company, one of my credentials was knowing quite a
bit about porphyry copper deposits.
How did you go about that?
Oh, by reading and visiting mines and looking at prospects and
talking to people. Later in my career, in the 1960s, I set out on
a program, with malice aforethought, to try to visit every
porphyry copper deposit in the world. I tallied up at one point
that I had been to more than half of them. But when 1 went to
work for Utah Construction Company--
I think we should talk about that,
break.
[tape interruption]
Let s take just a bit of
Senior Geologist, Utah Construction Company, 1959
Swent: We re resuming after a little break here. You have been at
Southwest Ventures, you ve built your house and built your
swimming pool. How did you come to leave Ventures and go to Utah?
Lowell: Well, I was offered a job by Utah Construction Company in San
Francisco as a senior geologist, with the understanding that I
would be returning to Arizona as a district geologist for them.
Swent: How did this offer come about?
66
Lowell: You know, I don t remember what the circumstances of the offer
were.
Swent : Who gave it to you?
Lowell: It came from the vice president in charge of exploration, Wes
Bourret. I really had relatively little contact with him. The
person that I reported to during most of my time with Utah was
Hollis G. Peacock, who was chief geologist.
Swent: What was the name of the company at that time?
Lowell: Utah Construction Company.
Swent: It was still Utah Construction. Not yet Construction and Mining?
It was originally Utah Construction and then at some point they
added Utah Construction and Mining.
Lowell: I don t think it was Utah Construction and Mining.
Swent: What did you know about Utah at that time? 1
Lowell: Not a great deal. I knew that it was an important heavy
construction company, and I knew that they were pretty heavily in
mining, principally iron mining and coal mining.
Swent: Had they gotten into uranium then?
Lowell: Yes, they were in uranium also. I have a faint recollection that
part of the background for my job offer was the fact that I was
knowledgeable about copper exploration.
Swent: Had you been getting tired of Ventures?
Lowell: Well, not really, but the funding was beginning to run out for
Ventures program in the southwest. Edith had been feeling
insecure working for a small company. She later, by trial and
error, discovered that small companies, all things being equal,
are more secure places than large companies [laughs]. But neither
of us totally understood that at that time.
Hollie Peacock probably taught me more exploration geology
than anyone that I teamed up with in my professional career.
Swent: Had you known him before?
See Alexander Wilson, interview in process 1999, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
67
Lowell: No, I hadn t. Most people found Hollie Peacock to be a little bit
abrasive. He was a very fast-thinking, kind of ironic, hard-to-
joke-with type of a fellow. I was almost the only one in our
department in San Francisco that really appreciated Hollie
Peacock. I think he was very productive, and was probably almost
in the genius range as far as intelligence.
Swent : So did you move out there?
Lowell: Yes. We moved from Tucson to Palo Alto, California. Utah had an
office in Palo Alto at the time 1 went to work, but it was kind of
a temporary office arrangement. Our office was shortly afterwards
moved to their corporate office on California Street in San
Francisco. I had to commute to San Francisco after our office
moved .
One of my fellow geologists working for Utah was Paul
Riddell. Paul was also a second-generation miner. Have you ever
heard of the Riddell mucker?
Swent: No, I haven t.
Lowell: His father was a professor, I think in Michigan Tech, and invented
a clamshell mucking device for sinking shafts. Was a well-known
mining person. But Paul and 1 lived close to each other in Palo
Alto, and we shared rides and commuted together to the office in
San Francisco. Paul had a home brewing operation going, and when
he had extended field work at a critical time, when I was in the
office I had to tend his batch of beer for him [chuckles].
We were a symbiotic team in the commuting process because I
was a morning person, and he was a night person, and I often had
to drive the car on the trip to the railroad station in the
morning, and he would drive back at night. He had problems like
forgetting to put a belt in his pants and leaving the lights on
[chuckles] and being late and whatnot.
Swent: You took the train up.
Lowell: We took the train. We drove to the Palo Alto train station and
took the train to the San Francisco station and either walked or
took a bus to the financial district. I did pretty much the same
sort of work for Utah that I had been doing in Arizona, and did a
lot of airline traveling to various places, evaluating mineral
prospects and an occasional drilling program.
Swent: Where were they?
68
Lowell: Well, mostly in western U.S. and Mexico. I don t remember whether
I got out of North America ever. I don t believe so. After
working for something over a year in California, I was invited to
go to Arizona to open a branch exploration office for Utah in
Tucson, which had been the original understanding with them. I
did work on several copper projects. One was the Sacaton area,
where Asarco was in the process of discovering the Sacaton ore
body. Other work was in Utah, in the Eureka district and Cedar
City area in Utah.
Swent: They had an iron mine in Cedar City.
Lowell: Right. And I visited the mine, but I really didn t make any
contribution to geology there. After two years, Hollie visited my
office in Tucson, and he said--well, I m skipping one step in
this. That is, Edith was very homesick to return to Arizona--
Swent : I was thinking you had just built your new house.
Lowell: We had just built the new house, and instead of selling it, we
rented it, hoping to come back.
Swent: Did you have three children by now?
Lowell: Three children. She was overjoyed to come back to Arizona. I
knew that she really didn t want to leave again. And Hollie came
to my office, and he said, "I have good news for you. You re
going to be transferred to Vancouver and you ll have five
geologists reporting to you, and it s a big promotion."
I said, "Well, Hollie, I won t go to Vancouver."
He thought a minute, and he said, "Well, in that case,
you re fired."
1 thought a minute, then, and I said, "Well, in that case,
why don t you give me a retainer to be a listening post and agent
for Utah in Arizona?"
And he thought a minute, and he said, "Okay." [laughs] And
so that s how I got in the consulting business. It all happened
within five minutes.
And when I told Edith about it, she was very happy to hear
she wasn t leaving Tucson, but very worried about not having any
security.
69
VIII LOCATING THE KALAMAZOO ORE BODY IN ARIZONA
Becoming an Independent Consultant, 1961
Swent : Had you entertained this thought at all before then?
Lowell: I had thought a little bit about it, but it was really very much a
spur-of-the-moment decision. So she hustled around, trying to get
her teaching certificate. I had some old patented mining claims
near Prescott that 1 had acquired kind of on a fluke. After I
left Utah Construction I started a project to try to develop these
as cabin sites, and at the same time informed all my friends that
I was available to do consulting work.
Swent: So this was 19--
Lowell: In 1961.
Swent: I m trying to think. You were thirty-three years old.
Lowell: Mmm, that s right.
Swent: Had three children. How old were the children then?
Lowell: Well, they were roughly--
Swent: Let s see.
Lowell: [chuckles]
Swent: Bill. You call him Bill?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: He was nine, Susie must have been eleven. Doug is your third
child. He was--
Lowell: He was born June 6, 1956, so he would have been five years old.
70
Swent : And he was born in Tucson also?
Lowell: He was born in Prescott.
Swent: Prescott, okay. So you had a lot of responsibilities-
Lowell: [chuckles] That s what Edith said.
Swent: --for a young man. But you were young and healthy and--
Lowell: Optimistic.
Swent: It s amazing, though, to make a decision of that magnitude.
Lowell: Well, that is not really very surprising in the mining business.
Anyway, I started hustling around, expecting the worst, and I did
have this relatively small retainer from Utah, which was
equivalent to a couple of days a month of work. To my surprise,
work started coming in. 1 worked for Kern County Land Company on
several projects. One was a choice assignment in Death Valley in
July and September [chuckles].
Swent: Oh, my! What sort of thing was that?
Lowell: Oh, it was managing some drilling projects for borate deposits,
the sort of thing that U.S. Borax had. It wasn t the borax
mineral. It was colemanite and some other mineral, but the same
kind of occurrence. 1
Swent: This was a project they already had.
Lowell: That they already had, but they didn t have anybody to send over.
I had a similar job on a potash project for Kern County and Duval
Corporation up near Navajo, Arizona. And probably a couple of
other jobs.
Swent: How did Kern County know about you?
Lowell: Well, the area chief geologist was Wayne Wallace, who was a friend
of mine in Tucson. At about the same time, Bob Fulton, who was
vice president in charge of exploration for Newmont , asked me to
do some work for Newmont.
See Carl L. Randolph, "Research Manager to President, U.S. Borax &
Chemical Corporation, 1957-1986," 1992; and Eugene David Smith, "Working on
the Twenty-Mule Team: Laborer to Vice President, U.S. Borax & Chemical
Corporation, 1941-1989," 1993, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
71
Consultant on Porphyry Copper for Newmont
Swent : How did you know him?
Lowell: Well, I didn t know him, but he knew of me.
Swent: How did he know of you?
Lowell: Well, I had a little bit of a reputation in porphyry copper work
at that time, and Newmont at that time was really more of a
holding company than a mining company. They operated a number of
large mines, but as partly-owned subsidiaries. The company itself
had a very small exploration staff.
Swent: They had Carlin. 2
Lowell: They had Carlin, and they had geologists working there, and they
had O Okiep and Palabora in Africa and at least one other
important mine. But the exploration staff in New York was only
Bob Fulton and maybe one other fellow. They had a research center
in New England, in Danbury, Connecticut, where there were two or
three people who were the manager was Arthur Brant. It was more
of a research effort. They had a couple of people in Vancouver,
but they were working mostly in Canada.
Swent: Did you work at all with John Livermore?
Lowell: A little bit, yes, but not a great deal. Bob Fulton was in the
habit of using consultants more than most companies do, as kind of
staff supplements. I got along very well with Newmont and spent
most of my time for a couple of years working with Newmont.
[Bob Fulton was one of the most impressive people 1 have
known. He was a very intelligent, determined, decisive man, but
economical of words in both his conversation and his letters. One
letter he sent me consisted of only four or five words. He had
been a distance runner in college and liked to hike long distances
when reviewing exploration projects with me. He was grimly
determined to get any job done and not inclined to accept excuses.
2
See Plato Malozemoff, "A Life in Mining: Siberia to Chairman of
Newmont Mining Corporation, 1909-1985," 1990; Frank Woods McQuiston, Jr.,
"Metallurgist for Newmont Mining Corporation and U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission, 1934-1982," 1989; William A. Humphrey, "Mining Operations and
Engineering Executive for Anaconda, Newmont, Homestake, 1950 to 1995,"
1996; and John Livermore, interview in process 1999, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
72
When I began to do consulting work for him he was vice president of
Newmont, and he later became president of Maclntyre Porcupine Mines
in Canada, where I again did consulting work for him twice at
Madeleine Mine in Quebec. Bob and John Livermore were managers of
the team that found the Carlin deposit. John Livermore got most of
the credit, but I understood that there had been an acrimonious
argument about credit within Newmont, and 1 have always suspected
that Bob Fulton, who was a very stiff-necked and understated guy,
probably didn t get as much credit as he should have.]
3
Swent : What sort of arrangement did you have with them?
Lowell: Well, it was just on a daily-fee basis. I don t remember having a
retainer contract with Newmont. I may have had some kind of a
minimum time guarantee, but it was mostly just job by job. I
usually worked directly with Bob Fulton in the field. I worked
with a couple of other people from Carlin, Nevada, a little bit;
but mostly I worked by myself on the Newmont projects.
Swent: What exactly were you doing?
Lowell: I evaluated mineral prospects and did geologic mapping, and 1 did
a little bit of work at San Manuel, but it was as a guide for
giving Newmont geologists from other parts of the world a sort of
a short course in porphyry copper geology. And I took two groups
to San Manuel--
Swent :
They didn t have anybody on their staff who could do that?
Lowell: Well--
Swent :
Lowell ;
When you had visitors, I would think you would ask your own
resident geologist to show them around. Maybe they didn t have
one .
Well, they had a number of geologists in San Manuel, and one or
two of them went with us when these tours would visit San Manuel,
but I took the same group of geologists to other copper deposits
in Arizona and gave them a short course in porphyry copper
geology. I did that twice. As I remember it, one group--! think
at that time John Livermore was in charge of their work in Canada,
He came with a group of Canadian geologists. And the other group
were kind of multinational. They were from Africa, Australia,
different places.
3
This paragraph was added by Mr. Lowell during the editing process.
73
Out of that work came the Kalamazoo discovery, indirectly.
I had been kind of skeptical about the description of the geology
of San Manuel Mine before this happened.
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell
Swent:
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell
Geology of the San Manuel Mine, Arizona
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Well, San Manuel was originally mapped by a fellow named Schwartz.
This was back in the wartime copper development period. I forget:
I think I met Schwartz once, but I didn t participate in the San
Manuel work. But he logged a large number of churn drill holes,
many of which passed through the San Manuel Fault into the San
Manuel ore body. He was uncertain about the origin of San Manuel
ore body.
The fault had already been named and was recognized?
Yes, it was named during the San Manuel exploration work.
Schwartz, 1 think, did a good job on his study. I think he was
working for the USGS [United States Geological Survey] when he did
that. Then around 1960 the USGS did another study in the
district, and a fellow named Cy Creasey, who probably did not do
as capable a job as Schwartz but more academic, mapped the San
Manuel Fault and geology of that quadrangle in the San Pedro
Valley. Creasey described the San Manuel ore body as a typical
canoe-shaped deposit. And that puzzled me because--
Was this in a USGS paper?
Yes. That puzzled me because I didn t know of any other canoe-
shaped ore body in the world [chuckles], especially a porphyry
copper deposit. The San Manuel deposit is like a--is canoe-
shaped. It s kind of a trough-shaped deposit with essentially
barren material in what would be the inside of a trough.
Yes.
And Cy Creasey explained that as a barren intrusion into the
deposit. He explained the San Manuel Fault, which looks like this
[demonstrating] --
That doesn t show on the tape. So it s dipping like a--
Okay. The San Manuel Fault dips to the southwest and cuts off the
San Manuel ore body on the top. Cy Creasey in his paper said he
thought the San Manuel Fault was a strike-slip fault; in other
words, had displaced the missing part of the ore body laterally
rather than vertically. None of this--by this time, I had visited
quite an impressive list of porphyry copper occurrences in North
America and other places, and it didn t seem to fit with my ideas
about concentric zoning of porphyry deposits, and seemed like an
illogical conclusion to reach.
So during these two Newmont tours, we had maps and I made a
point of collecting rock specimens in a fence pattern across the
ore body both times, which is somewhat difficult going through San
Manuel because the walls have been grouted with high-pressure
concrete and it s only an occasional window where you actually see
the rock.
But I was able to piece together specimens and then took
them back to my office and brooded over them, and the mineral
assemblage and the silicate alteration assemblage. I came up with
an alternative thought about the geometry of the deposit, which
was that it was half of what had originally been a vertical
cylinder and had been tilted, and then had been sliced by a fault
this way [demonstrating]..
Swent :
Vertically.
Lowell: Not vertically, but at a steeper angle. I didn t really think
very much more about it at the time, but I talked to Bob Fulton
about this and said, "Why
don t you let me do some work on the
west side of the deposit? There might be a target over there to
find the missing piece of the ore body." He turned me down,
partly because he didn t want to ruffle the feathers of the
geologists working at San Manuel.
Swent: May I interrupt with a couple of questions? Is it generally done
that when you re going through a mine like this you can grab
samples as you go along? Is that all right?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: You didn t have to be surreptitious about it?
Lowell: No, no, no.
Swent: Were other people doing it at the same time?
Lowell: Yes, yes. But they were doing it more out of curiosity, to have
some rocks to take back to Canada, and I was doing it more to try
to understand the geology. Dr. Muller would have approved greatly
75
of that, rejecting the dogma and trying to come up with a new
idea.
Swent: It s not in a class with shoplifting, in other words.
Lowell: No [chuckles],
Swent: Okay. I just wanted to make that clear.
Lowell: No, it was perfectly legitimate, and I would ask the Newmont
geologists for locations so I would mark it on my bag.
Swent: I had another question, too: This is as a person who is far from a
geologist, but when you do this, how do you know which way it
went? I mean, the top part and then you ve got two halves cut by
a fault, but how do you know which one goes up and which goes
down?
Lowell: Well, I ll get to that--
Swent: Okay. Wasn t there also a chance that it could have slipped the
other way?
Lowell: Yes, although that would have made it a reverse fault, and this
was in extensional terrain, where things are in the course of
being pulled apart. When they re pulled apart, normally you get
normal faults. If you pull this [demonstrating], then that slides
down. So that was a possibility, but a remote possibility.
Swent: You were just saying Fulton didn t especially want to ruffle the
feathers of the geologists there by taking your suggestion.
Lowell: Yes, by having me come in and second-guess their idea. But it was
proposed to Newmont and rejected. A few months after my second
visit to San Manuel, a Texas independent oil company, Quintana
Petroleum, were told by their financial advisors that they should
diversify away from oil production and get into the mining
business. This was a popular idea among oil companies.
Mostly, the oil companies, in kind of a sheep mentality, did
the same thing at about the same time, and it turned out
disastrous for almost all [chuckles]. But Quintana, I believe,
contacted Kenyon Richard or Harold Courtright, with Asarco, to ask
who they should hire for a local consultant to manage some copper
exploration work for them in the Southwest, and they got my name
from Asarco.
76
Ouintana Petroleum Company
Lowell: This group arrived in Tucson, and it was more like a Middle East
monarch arriving. It s a family company, and they were super-
wealthy people.
Swent : What were their names? *
Lowell: Cullen.
Swent: Oh, yes.
Lowell: Arnold. The history of Quintana Petroleum is there was an oil
driller whose name was Roy Cullen, who kind of dabbled in oil
leases also. In one area that was considered favorable for oil
production, no one had been able to drill holes through a
formation that was called the Heaving Shale. Roy Cullen decided
that he could do this, and he acquired a big block of ground and
succeeded in drilling holes, some of them that were enormously
productive in oil. I guess almost overnight the family became
very wealthy.
One of the things that the Quintana Petroleum Company did
was contribute $150 million to the Houston University Medical
Center, which at that time was the largest individual gift ever
given to a university in the United States. The fellow running
the company at the time I was associated with them was Corbin J.
Robertson. He was known as Corby Robertson. Corby had married
the youngest daughter of Roy Cullen, whose name is Wilhelmina. I
visited many times in their house in Houston and got well
acquainted. The company was operated as a kind of family
atmosphere company.
Anyway, Corby arrived with his money-handling man and his
lawyer and his geologist and his drilling manager and I met with
them in one of the fancy hotels in Tucson. They agreed to hire me
on a retainer basis for a limited period of time. They had
already in their files some mineral prospects that they wanted
evaluated in southern Arizona that other people had submitted to
them.
I looked at a couple of these. One was on the other side of
the San Pedro Valley, past San Manuel. I spent a day looking
around. It was a geophysical anomaly, and I decided that it
didn t look very interesting, by looking at the geology with which
the anomaly was associated. Most geophysical anomalies have no
real significance, and this was one of those. But coming back, I
drove through Mammoth and Oracle. I had a friend named Ted
77
Johnson who worked for the Department of Mineral Resources who
lived in Oracle, and in the course of driving over and back I got
to thinking about San Manuel and thought, well, these oil people
have money enough to drill some deep holes, and I wonder what the
status of the property is next to San Manuel.
Martha Pursell s Unlucky Drilling Program
Lowell: It was owned by a lady whose name was Martha--she is dead, but her
name was Martha Pursell. She was married to a dentist in Tucson,
and one side or the other of the family had a significant amount
of money. Martha Pursell s interest was in having a churn drill
company. She wore bib overalls and was a big, beefy, loud,
aggressive woman. I never met Mrs. Pursell, but this is a second
hand description. She had acquired this group of mining claims
that were adjacent to the Newmont claims at San Manuel. She had
held the claims for many years, like fifteen or twenty years, I
suppose. She knew something about ore deposits and was advised by
geologists .
Anyway, she set out to personally drill deep churn drill
holes on the Pursell side of the boundary. She had unbelievably
bad luck. Some of these holes--a churn drill technology-wise is
kind of like a stone axe. It s just banging a bit on the ground,
and you get a penetration of maybe ten feet per twenty-four hours.
It s a very hard way to get a hole drilled. But it had been more
or less a standard technology for some time.
She drilled six holes five or six. She drilled five holes,
I guess. Some of the holes had been as deep as 3,000 feet, which
was sort of drilling for a whole year [chuckles] on one hole. She
had personally run the machine, herself. But with a crew.
Swent : Her husband was drilling teeth, and she was out there drilling for
copper.
Lowell: She had the bad luck to have located one hole over the Kalamazoo
ore body that wasn t deep enough and another one that was deep
enough that wasn t over the Kalamazoo ore body. The Kalamazoo ore
body, remember, is a mirror image of San Manuel.
Swent: It s a cylinder.
Lowell: It s a cylinder, but it s like an overturned canoe, so it s got a
high point on the east end that is relatively easy to get to reach
with a drill hole, but this end and these sides [demonstrating
78
with a tilted soft drink can] are deep. So she drilled a hole
deep enough but over here, and a hole in the right place but not
deep enough.
Swent: Ohh!
Lowell: All of these drill samples were saved and dutifully logged by the
San Manuel geologists, who were interested to be Johnny-at-the-
rathole if an ore body was found.
Swent :
Why would she give them to them?
Lowell: Well, for getting free geology done and because they were her most
obvious purchaser or joint venture partner if she was successful.
Swent: You were saying that you were driving back through Oracle.
Lowell: Yes, and I thought, "Well, gosh, maybe"--this fellow s name was
Ted Johnson. I said, "Gosh, as long as I m coming by, maybe I
ought to stop and talk to Ted."
Swent: What connection did he have?
Lowell: Well, he was the Department of Mineral Resources local
representative. He covered, I think, a good part of southern
Arizona .
Swent: I see, this is the state.
Lowell: Yes, he worked for the state. I had talked to him before about
the San Manuel area, and so I stopped to ask him if he knew
anything about the availability of this property. He said, "Well,
as a matter of fact, Mrs. Pursell died just a month ago," and the
estate, he thought, would be open to selling the claim. And Mrs.
Pursell had a kind of a worthless nephew who was a lawyer in, I
think, in Bisbee, Arizona. I called him and he said, "Well, go
see Frank Salazar, who is our watchman on the mining claims."
Frank Salazar had been a miner at San Manuel for many years.
Disputed Ownership of the Kalamazoo Claim
Lowell: So I made another trip and talked to Frank Salazar, and he said,
"Well, as a matter of fact, I m more the owner of the ground than
Mrs. Pursell s heirs, who haven t paid the assessment work, and I
did the assessment work, more or less, and have been living"--he
was actually living on the claim. "I would be willing to make a
79
joint deal with Mr. So-and-So," the lawyer. But he said, "There s
a crooked promoter whose name is Jerry Bell, who has overstaked
our valid claims since Mrs. Pursell died." Jerry Bell had been
some kind of associate of Mrs. Pursell and jumped her claims when
she died.
Anyway, this was all a legal snarl. It was a little bit
hard to tell who was the biggest crook [chuckles] among the group
at that point.
Swent: And Newmont wasn t getting in the picture at all?
Lowell: No. No, they hadn t done anything about it, which is an astute
observation because they should have gone in and acquired the
property, just on general principles. And so I talked to the
lawyer nephew, and I talked to Frank Salazar, and I negotiated for
Quintana a reasonable deal on their claim. And then Jerry Bell
showed up, maybe hearing about the activity, and said, "You can t
make a deal with these people. These are really my claims and not
theirs." I think he then filed a suit against the Pursell estate.
We hiredwe being Quintanahired the most highly-perfumed
law firm in Tucson to represent Quintana. They said that they
thought that the Pursell family s title was better than Jerry
Bell s. But by then the lawsuit was underway. I in the meantime
had undertaken a scientific study of the evidence. This consisted
of evaluating the published data on San Manuel.
Re-examining the Maps and Re-logging the Drill Samples
Lowell: One thing that I did was plotting the elevation of the pierce
points of the original drill holes that were given in the
published Schwartz report on San Manuel, and then I made a contour
map of the surface of the fault coming down from San Manuel
towards Kalamazoo. The map showed a giant mullion structure, a
rolling surface like this [demonstrating] , that suggested that the
upper plate of the fault had moved through these grooves down
towards the Kalamazoo ore body. And then I did an archeological
dig to excavate the samples which had been left in a mine adit and
had been--
Swent: --which had been welded together, you said.
80
Lowell: Yes. I collected the samples. All of the Pursell churn drill
samples had been put in labeled paper bags and stored in a short
tunnel, adit, on the property. The adit had a wooden door and a
hive of wild bees were on the inside and had to be removed. Over
the years, ground water from rains had dripped from the ceiling of
the tunnel and caused these bags to weld together. The numbers
were still visible on the bags, but the bags weren t intact. And
so I hired a graduate student from the university, whose name was
Will Chester, to--with a new set of bags and a spatula and a brush
and whatnot--to excavate these bags, one by one, and rebag them.
I already had the logs that had been made by the Newmont
geologist for the churn drill holes and given to Martha Pursell.
But they hadn t logged the information that tied into my approach
to determine the concentric zoning of a porphyry copper deposit,
which were things like the silicate minerals, chlorite, epidote,
sericite, potassium feldspar, quartz; and sulfide mineral
information like percent of pyrite and chalcopyrite.
So we relogged all the samples. It was quite a significant
job because there was probably 10,000 feet of drilling represented
and 2,000 samples. When that was finished, eureka! it all fit
into this picture of this pyritic halo around a chalcopyrite-
pyrite ore shell and silicate zoning with chlorite and epidote in
the propylitic alteration, sitting outside of the quartz sericite
or phyllic zone. I felt the central barren area in the San Manuel
ore body was potassic alteration. Later, in the publication that
John Guilbert and I made, we actually named some of these porphyry
copper zones. We coined the word "phyllic" and coined the word
"potassic," which are now accepted names.
With the mullion structures on the fault and the evidence
that the outcrop near Kalamazoo and the deep churn drill holes had
intersected symmetrical alteration on the sides of the deposit and
the fault lines pointed in the same direction, I was able to come
up with an almost airtight picture as to where the ore body was,
even though it hadn t been intersected by the drill holes.
I located a hole that was close to where the shallowest part
of the Kalamazoo part was, close to the fault, like here
[demonstrating] and went over to explain what I wanted to do to
Quintana, and Corby Robertson said, "I don t like that location.
If I find an ore body, I want to be sure that it s a huge ore
body." So he made me move it [chuckles] all the ways back to the
middle of the ore body.
I drove up on the surface once with Edith, and I said, "You
know, if we re lucky, we may be sitting over the middle of a
multi-hundred-million-ton ore body." I could at that point almost
81
say what the tonnage and grade was because it would be similar to
the other half at San Manuel. We got a drill rig with sufficient
depth capacity.
All this time the lawsuit was going on between the Pursell
group and Jerry Bell. While we were drilling this first hole,
before it had gotten to the depth to hit the ore body, Jerry Bell
showed up out on the property, and Frank Salazar saw him and went
up to the drill rig. Jerry Bell was up on the drill platform, and
Frank Salazar said, "You re going to have to get out of here.
You ve got no right to be on that drill platform." Jerry Bell
turned around and kicked him in the face [chuckles] and cut his
nose, and had to have a couple of stitches in it.
Swent : Oh, my.
Lowell: When I heard about that a couple of hours later, I called the
lawyer up and 1 said, "Jerry Bell has kicked Frank Salazar and
he s had to have his face sewed up."
And the lawyer said, "Oh,
that s good! That s very good!" [laughs] "That will help our
case." [laughter]
While our project was going on, the lawyer instructed us to
hire several samplers who were to establish pedis possessio. They
had to put their foot on each claim every day and make a record of
this, to prove that we were really there, establishing pedis
possessio [chuckles] on the ground. So after we drilled a couple
of holes, that became--
"Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel"
Swent: Now, is it true that the first hole was the one-
Lowell: Well, the first hole had a long ore intercept. After that, it was
just like shooting fish in a barrel. Every one of our drill holes
had an ore intercept.
Swent: Was the first one drilled farther away, as Robertson wanted?
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: It had to be deeper, then.
Lowell: It had to be deeper, that s right.
82
Swent : If they had drilled where you wanted to, it would have cut in
sooner.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: I must say, when I was reading this report I thought it s a very
exciting, dramatic document. It isn t often that a geology paper
gets as exciting as that one, but it was very dramatic.
Lowell: Well, it was.
Swent: I got chills down my spine [chuckles] when that drill hole went
down.
Lowell: But the really amazing thing was that I simultaneously had a
project going for Newmont, on the Papago Indian reservation, which
also found an ore body, the Vekol Hills ore body.
Swent: The same day?
Lowell: Well, it was maybe the same week. It was almost exactly the same
time .
Swent: Did you go out there to these?
Lowell: No. By that time the Vekol Hills project had been taken away from
me, and Newmont had sent in their own geologist to manage it.
Swent: What about the Kalamazoo one? Were you there when they drilled?
Lowell: Yes, yes. I was there every day on that one.
Swent: Could you tell from the cuttings?
Lowell: Well, it was kind of an agony of suspense. I had an office in our
home at that time--
Swent : That s another question I was going to ask: where you were doing
these maps and so on.
Lowell: Well, I had taken over part of the house on Rudasill Road as an
office. We moved back in the Rudasill house and made part of the
garage into an office, and I was doing the office work there. But
the other half of the garage I was using for laying these trays of
samples out. The propylitic zone in porphyry coppers is green
rock, and the phyllic zone is grey rock. The sequence was from
green, low-pyrite material to green, high-pyrite material, to
grey, high-pyrite with a sniff of chalcopyrite, and then over a
83
short interval into ore-grade chalcopyrite-pyrite-porphyry-copper
ore .
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
And what color is that?
That s grey, light grey. So these samples were being laid out in
our garage. Edith and the kids were anxiously looking at the
color [chuckles] of the cuttings.
They were bringing them into your house?
Well, yes. I think I had a sampler that was bringing them from
the drill rig to the house. We had a Jones splitter, and we were
splitting out samples to send to the assay lab. We were using
Jacobs Assay Lab in Tucson. He was also noticing the ore grades--
or the copper grades which were going from almost nil to .03 to
.05 to .20 percent copper. And Mr. Jacobs commented on this, that
it looked like the grade was going up, and I thought, well, with
the lawsuit and all in progress, it s probably dangerous to have
the ore samples assayed in Tucson because it might get back to the
people on the other side of the lawsuit.
So when I thought we were about to get into the ore body and
I could recognize chalcopyrite in the samples, I sent a set of
samples to Union Assay in Salt Lake City, which was probably a
good idea, but it didn t work out very well because the Greyhound
Bus Company lost the samples in Kingman, Arizona [chuckles], for a
week. I was just terribly anxious to find out what the grade was.
But when the samples were finally found and the assays were made,
why, it was half a percent or one percent copper.
Shortly after that, somebody from Quintana negotiated with
Jerry Bell and bought him off to get rid of the lawsuit.
So it was settled.
It was settled.
We should get it on the record, the naming, why it was called
Kalamazoo.
Well, I think that s probably in the little paper that I gave you.
But Corbin Robertson and Wilhelmina Cullen had been sweethearts
during the Second World War. He was a navigator on a bomber
flying out of England to bomb Germany. This was the time of the
big bands. Corbin was kind of a romantic guy, anyway, but he
named projects after Glenn Miller songs. There was one called
"String of Pearls" and I forget what all, but this was "The Girl
from Kalamazoo."
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Let s go back. So you got the assays, then, from Union in Salt
Lake. That was pretty clear that you had found the other half of
the San Manuel ore body, but did you pick up the phone and call
Corbin Robertson?
Oh, yes, we were talking every day.
chief geologist.
Do we have his name?
I talked mostly with their
The mining property man s name was Tiger Morris, and Ronald
Thompson was chief geologist.
So you called him and--
Well, the first hole that they drilled in their minerals program--
they eventually ended up spending maybe twenty or fifty million
dollars in mineral exploration. The first hole and they probably
drilled hundreds or thousands of drill holesbut the first one
they drilled found this Kalamazoo ore body [chuckles]. They
weren t too excited about it. They thought, well, this is
probably how it is in the mining business. In the oil business,
you could expect to find one oil well out of five or ten holes.
In the mining business, it s more like one out of a thousand or
five thousand. So there was a certain amount of communication gap
there .
They weren t as excited as they had a right to be.
Yes. They got more excited afterwards. Well, they really were
pretty excited.
What sort of arrangement did you have with them? Did you have a
finder s fee?
No, I didn t have an agreement, but they gave me a finder s fee
anyway, which I thought was pretty decent of Quintana. But the
finder s fee wasn t terribly large. I got, I think, a $120,000
fee from Quintana. And they were also paying me well as a
consultant .
Well, that should have allayed some of your family s fears about
going into business for yourself.
Yes, but that was in 1965, and by that time-
That s a lot of money.
85
Lowell: Well, it was a lot of money, and we were very happy about it, but
by that time I had really gotten well established in the
consulting business, and I was already busy almost full time.
Swent: Did you have a fee, then, from Vekol Hills also?
Lowell: No. That s one of the dumber things that I ve done. But Bob
Fulton asked me if I thought I deserved a fee, and I said,
grandly, no, I was working as a consultant [chuckles] on that. I
could very well have gotten some kind of an interest in it, but
since the deposit was never developed through a chain of
unfortunate circumstances, if I had an interest in the production,
it wouldn t have been worth anything.
Swent: Well, you wanted to stop. I have lots of other questions, but
they ll keep. This might be a good time to stop. We ve got
Kalamazoo nailed down, and that certainly was the beginning of a
long string of exciting discoveries.
Lowell: Yes. Well, all of them were to a large extent good luck, but it
contributes to good luck when you stick your neck out and try
innovative things.
Swent: I think what George Brimhall [Professor of Geology at the
University of California, Berkeley] told me was that and I hope I
can phrase this the proper way that one of the significant things
here was that you pulled together two different views, on the
concentric zoning and the breccia pipe-
Lowell: Yes. The tilted pipe.
Swent: They had been separate until then, that you were the one who
pulled together the two ways of looking at this, the lateral and
the vertical.
Lowell: Yes. It s surprising to me that somebody hadn t earlier had the
same idea. It really wasn t a very complicated idea.
Swent: I guess that s the key question that we hope to answer, is why you
did it and nobody else.
Lowell: I hear my canine friend yapping, which may mean that Edith is
coming.
Swent: Your wife is coming. Let s stop here. This is a good time to
stop.
86
IX BUILDING A WORLD-WIDE REPUTATION
[Interview 2: September 16, 1998] ##
A Scam Uranium Deposit in the Dominican Republic
Swent: We re continuing now on September 16th, 1998, with the interview
with David Lowell. A big Mexican holiday [chuckles], but it
doesn t seem to be affecting things here. First of all, we re
going to just pick up some of the things that we overlooked
yesterday, [consults list] One was when you were with the Atomic
Energy Commission.
Lowell: Yes, one thing that was a big adventure at the time, and I have
since done other things somewhat similar, was the Atomic Energy
Commission was approached by the government of the Dominican
Republic. At that time, the Dominican Republic was run by a
dictator whose name was Trujillo. There was a certain amount of
tension between various Caribbean countries. Mr. Trujillo was
told that a uranium deposit had been found in the Dominican
Republic, and this was very interesting to him because it conjured
up the picture of an atom bomb, which would make him an important
person among his Caribbean neighbors and so forth. I think it was
all a little bit imaginary and impractical. But in any case, the
Dominicans asked the U.S. government if they could send a uranium
expert to the Dominican Republic to look at this so-called uranium
deposit. So I was selected to go down and look at the deposit.
The general manager of the exploration division of the Atomic
Energy Commission, whose name was Ernie Gordon, decided it sounded
like a nice junket, and he went with me. He was not a geologist
but went down as kind of a manager.
It was my first overseas trip. We rode in a Constellation
airplane to eastern U.S. and another airplane down to Santo
Domingo. I believe I have the name right for the capital, but at
that time it was called Ciudad Trujillo. Mr. Trujillo had named
the capital after himself, and the name was later changed back.
We arrived at the airport and were met by the secretary of the
87
state without portfolio, who escorted us through immigration and
customs without even stopping. Then we were loaded into a black
Cadillac limousine and driven to the Jaragua Hotel, which at that
time was the number one resort hotel in Ciudad Trujillo. Then the
secretary of state told us that he was turning the limousine over
to us for our use while we were in the Dominican Republic,
together with army driver and another gentleman with a submachine
gun, who sat beside [chuckles] the driver. Our vehicle was
equipped with a siren. In any cases of traffic jams, we turned
our siren on, and the other drivers had to drive into the ditch to
allow us [chuckles] to go by.
Swent :
Pretty exciting.
Lowell: So then we waited to go out to look at this mineral prospect, and
for several days nothing happened. I had to spend my time sitting
at a table by the swimming pool in my bathing suit and moving
every two hours when the shadow of an umbrella let the sun shine
on the table, and drinking rum drinks. There was a troupe of
chorus girls that performed at the hotel every night.
Occasionally, somebody from the government would come to talk to
us .
Then, finally, we made a trip out in the jungle to look at
the prospect. The prospect had been identified by an Italian
geologist who had gotten a contract with the Dominican Republic to
look for uranium deposits. It immediately became clear that this
was not a uranium deposit. I had come equipped with a Geiger
counter and a scintillation counter, and neither of them made even
the feeblest beep around this prospect, and there was no sign of
uranium minerals. It turned out that the Italian had cooked this
up as a scam to justify his salary and cushy position in the
Dominican Republic.
We had a colonel from the secret police who was with us
whose name was Colonel Calderon. He had a .45 automatic that he
wore, and he took this out and looked menacingly at the little
Italian fellow and said, "I think I ll solve this problem by
pistoleando this," and he used an expletive [chuckles]. We
thought that we were going to see an atrocity before our very
eyes. Ernie Gordon said, "Now, wait a minute, Colonel. You have
to realize that geology is not an exact science." [laughs
heartily] .
ti
Lowell: The colonel put this automatic pistol [chuckles] away. And the
Italian geologist was immediately captured and watched by some of
the soldiers that were with us. We went back to Ciudad Trujillo,
88
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell ;
Swent :
Lowell:
but I asked one of the officials about the origin of one of the
soldier s submachine guns, and he said that it was made in Ciudad
Trujillo and "here, do you want to try it out?" And so I had the
pleasure of firing a number of bullets into a palm trunk
[chuckles]. We went back to Ciudad Trujillo, and then there was
another hiatus, while we rotated with the sun next to the swimming
pool.
Then we were asked to go to the Italian geologist s house to
look for other evidence that he had perhaps had taken us to the
wrong prospect and there was really a rich uranium deposit
somewhere. And that was a very awkward trip because the Italian
geologist had taken up with a young Dominican girl who had a baby
and was living in the house, and I checked all of his rocks and
none of them were radioactive.
It finally turned out that the specimen that he had given
the Dominicans had originated in a uranium mine in Czechoslovakia.
He had a friend who was an Italian who was working in this mine or
had visited it, and had given him a high-grade specimen. The last
I heard was that he was tried and convicted and put in prison for
a couple of years in the Dominican Republic.
Then they asked me to do a quick survey and see if I could
find another uranium prospect for them. They hustled up a
deHavilland Beaver airplane that was capable of flying at low
level and fairly slow. I mounted my scintillation counter in the
airplane, and we flew around, flying traverses over promising
parts of the Dominican Republic and really didn t find anything
and finally returned to the United States. All of our expenses
while we were there were paid by the Dominican Republic, so it was
something like a five-week-long, posh vacation [chuckles]. But
that was probably the highlight of my employment with the Atomic
Energy Commission.
That sounds like a good time.
What s next?
About the newspaper: was this a significant activity in high
school or college?
No, it really wasn t. I was a member of the newspaper
distribution department.
You did tell about your paper route.
No, no. This was the University of Arizona newspaper.
89
Swent: I see. You worked on that.
Lowell: I had several pals among the people that were writing the
newspaper, all girls, but I made no significant contribution.
Testing AFMAG Geophysical Method by Helicopter
Swent :
Lowell :
And then you have something here about helicopter accidents,
haven t mentioned that.
You
Well, in about 1961, towards the end of my employment with Utah
Construction Company, Utah participated in a joint project with
Stan Ward, who at that time was a professor at the University of
California at Berkeley and with a geophysical group from Toronto,
Canada, to test the AFMAG geophysical method which depends on
natural earth telluric currents, which are theoretically distorted
by buried sulfide ore bodies. The area of the test was in the
Wasatch Mountains in Utah. I did the preliminary geological work
to identify a prospective area to test with the AFMAG survey.
The technique involved a helicopter towing a bird, and a
bird is a bomb-shaped device containing the geophysical sensor,
and mounted in the helicopter was a console of instruments which
we read, flying the traverses. The group consisted of Stan,
myself, and the helicopter pilot, and a technician who was a
German immigrant to Canada, whose name was Erik Kirschner. We had
a Hiller Model 12-E helicopter. The nominal elevation of our
survey lines was 12,000 feet, and the helicopter was capable of
flying reliably to about 11,500 feet, which presented an immediate
problem because we had multiple crashes of our bird hitting rocks
and pine trees and so forth. Whenever that happened, another one
had to be sent from Canada. We finally got down to the last one
in existence on our survey.
The other thing that happened was that the helicopter engine
stopped at 12,000 feet at one point. The elevation was higher
than the elevation at which the helicopter could auto-rotate, so
it immediately started to change from a flying machine to
something like a rock dropping. But there was momentum stored up
in the spinning rotor, and the helicopter pilot tipped it over and
dived for the ground and came in at a tangent and with lots of
loud noises and a certain amount of damage to the skids, but no
one was seriously hurt.
We had another incident in which part of the rotor flew off
into the bushes when we were warming up to take off, which would
90
have been a fatal accident if it had occurred in the air.
Finally, by mutual consent of everybody involved, including the
helicopter pilot, we all shook hands and went back to our
respective home bases.
I later was involved in another helicopter accident in Peru,
in which both engines on a military helicopter stopped in flight.
My experience is that helicopters are very dangerous machines, and
I ve known three people who were killed in helicopters and quite a
few others who had experiences like mine of non-fatal crashes.
Another Helicopter Accident, in Peru
Swent : Where was the one in Peru?
Lowell: The accident in Peru was out of Moquegua, Peru, in the southern
Peru copper belt. It was a Bell Model 212 helicopter with two
turbine engines. The automatic fuel control device malfunctioned,
and the engine stopped, but the military pilot in just a matter of
a few seconds was able to use a manual control and was able to
restart the helicopter, and we made an emergency landing but we
had to scramble around to get transportation back to Moquegua,
which took about one day in various vehicles and so forth. That
was also a situation where it was questionable that auto-rotation
would be possible. It was also at high altitude.
The Crash of a Utah Construction Company Plane
Swent: Were you working for Utah [Construction Company] at the time of
the airplane crash? The airplane crash that was so significant in
Utah history; you might mention that.
Lowell: Oh, that s right. That was a trip in which several people from
the San Francisco office were flying, I believe, to visit mining
operations in Utah. I had nothing to do with the mining
operations, but someone in the office mentioned that the Utah
company plane was going and asked me if Dick Ellett and I would
like to go along to see the mine. This sort of thing is commonly
done in the mining business, to allow staff members to visit
mining operations just for general information.
Swent: I think it was the Iron Springs Mine, near Cedar City, wasn t it?
91
Lowell: I think it was, yes. Iron mine. The airplane involved was a
converted military airplane, and I don t remember what it was
called. It was something like a Lodestar airplane, but it was a
very high-powered airplane and not up to the normal civilian
airline company airplane standards of safety. It was more built
for combat-type conditions. I don t remember the circumstances of
the crash, but the crash was probably caused by using the wrong
airplane in the wrong situation.
Swent: How did you happen not to go?
Lowell: Well, I had another little job come up, and it would have
interfered with my--this was a kind of a monkey-business trip for
me and the other was something that I was responsible for doing,
so I bowed out on the trip. Dick Ellett was also unable to go,
and we have gotten together several times since to marvel about
our good luck.
Swent: Fortunate.
Lowell: Yes [chuckles]. Well, you can get killed walking across the
street at any time.
Engineer of Geology Degree, University of Arizona, 1959
Swent: That s true. You also mentioned that you did receive your Arizona
professional engineering degree.
Lowell: Yes. The College of Mines for a long time had a policy of each
year giving one degree in mining and one in metallurgy and one in
geology to outstanding graduates of the College of Mines who had
been in professional practice for at least ten years. They didn t
give all three degrees every year, but--
Swent : This would be an honorary degree.
Lowell: Yes, honorary degree. But they usually gave at least a couple.
In 1959--I had graduated in 1949--I was selected to receive the
degree of Engineer of Geology. It was given at the graduation
ceremonies of the university. There was some kind of a bright-
colored hood and mortar board and so on, and it was quite a deal
to receive the degree.
Swent: That was the first of several you ve received.
Lowell: Well, the first of two, anyway [chuckles].
David Lowell receiving Doctor Honoris Causa degree from Manuel Paredes
Manrique, Rector of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima,
Peru, August 14, 1998.
92
Doctor Honoris Causa. Universidad de San Marcos, Peru. 11* 9 8
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
Should we bring in the second one now?
Well, the second degree was a >octor--how do you pronounce that?--
Doctor Honoris Causa degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de
San Marcos in Lima, Peru. 1 had been peripherally involved with
the Escuela de Minas of the university, which is a mines college
which is in the process of being expanded into a more important
organization with the build-up of mining in Peru in recent years
under President Fujimori.
The San Marcos University itself is an interesting
institution. It has about 35,000 students and medical college and
architectural college and all the branches of a big university.
It was formed in 1551, which makes it the oldest university in the
Americas. A couple of years later, the University of Mexico was
inaugurated, and the traditions at San Marcos go back very far,
obviously. There s a lot of pomp and circumstance about the
university .
At the ceremony it was in the
downtown Lima, which is now kept as-
in the building. The building goes
it goes back several hundred years,
the Spanish government, which has a
about the Latin American culture and
contributed money to try to put the
condition.
old university building in
-they have two or more museums
back to--not back to 1551, but
It is now being renovated by
kind of paternalistic feeling
Latin America, and they have
buildings back in the original
The room in which the ceremony took place has mural
paintings in the ceiling which are very pretty. There were
something like a hundred guests at the ceremony, and all of the
decanos, which--decanos, I guess, means deans--and various people
from the College of Mines and College of Engineering. They had
the national police band, which played the American national
anthem and the Peruvian national anthem, and a chorus which sang
the Peruvian national anthem.
What time of day was it?
It was kind of a typical Lima day, which is overcast.
What time of day was the ceremony?
Oh, what time. The ceremony lasted from eleven o clock in the
morning until two o clock in the afternoon.
93
Swent:
Lowell:
Did yon have to wear some special kind of clothing?
Yes. 1 wore academic robe but not a mortar board. In Peru they
apparently don t use mortar boards in their academic ceremonies.
I am not sure what the explanation of this is. I think that
perhaps it wasn t in vogue in Spain in 1551 and so hasn t been
since.
Giving a Speech in Elegant Spanish about a Virtual University
Lowell: The ceremony involved a speech by the rector of the university and
a speech by a representative of the College of Mines. Then I had
to give a speech in Spanish, which I largely read, but it was
twenty-five minutes long. I wrote the speech in English and sent
it to my two staff people in Santiago, Chile, who are well
educated and sophisticated, and they translated it into elegant
Spanish for me.
Swent: We ll have to put that in the appendix.
1
Lowell: [chuckles] It seemed to go over well.
Swent: What was the gist of the speech?
Lowell: Well, the gist of the speech was that my ties to Peru really
extended back to the period before I was born, when my father
worked as a mining engineer in Peru, and ray sister was born in
Peru and has returned since to visit Cuzco, which was the place of
her birth. I talked about the problems of transfer of technology
from developed countries to developing countries and how the
process to some extent has reversed in some parts of the world,
such as Taiwan and Korea and Brazil and Chile, and how the
computer technology and Internet has made the possibility of
virtual universities more possible now, and about a project that
we are considering at the University of Arizona.
I m a member of the Geosciences Advisory Committee at the
University of Arizona, and we have talked about a project that I
originally suggested, which is sort of a nonresident master s
degree program in which master s candidates do only half of their
study as resident students and the other half is done away from
the university, using CD-ROMs and perhaps the Internet to take
:
See appendix.
part of their courses, which could also expand to other countries
fairly easily.
That was about the gist of my talk.
Swent: Why were you given this degree?
Lowell: Well, according to the speeches that were given, it was because of
my contributions to the development of the mining industry of Peru
and also other countries through the discovery of new mines. In
Peru, I m more or less responsible for one large mine development,
which is the Pierina gold deposit, and another deposit which is
not in development but which will be at some time in the future,
which is called Los Calatos . It s a copper deposit. And also, as
a result of my participation with and assistance in developing the
Escuela de Minas, which may have a link to the University of
Arizona in the future. So that s the story of the Peruvian
honorary degree.
Special Security Provisions Necessary
Swent: I think you might mention the special security provisions that
were necessary.
Lowell: Well, I have worked a lot in Peru during the period when there was
a great deal of Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path; terrorist
organization] activity going on. When I began my project in 1991,
there was an average of a car bomb every one to two weeks in
downtown Lima and lots of other bad things happening through most
of Peru. We were able to do our field work and other activities
with a fair degree of confidence, but we were careful in which
areas we worked in in Peru. But in recent years, Mr. Fujimori has
pretty much stamped out the Sendero Luminoso, but--
ii
Lowell: The Sendero Luminoso has now become pretty insignificant in Peru
as a terrorist problem, but I have noticed in other Latin American
countries that it s a fairly easy transition for an idealistic,
communist terrorist to become a practical capitalist bandit, and
there are a lot of those in Peru and lots of robberies and quite a
few kidnappings. At the time of ray next-to-last visit to Peru, a
gentleman I had met who was president of the Hochschild company
was murdered and his son kidnapped the day before I arrived in
Lima.
95
It occurred to me that because the honorary degree had
gotten newspaper publicity and lots of people in Peru knew that I
had collected a large amount of money from the sale of the
Arequipa Resources company that I would be a prime target at the
time of the honorary degree ceremony. So for the first time in my
life, I lined up a Peruvian security firm to furnish cars and
security planning and some bodyguards to accompany myself and my
wife in the trips around Lima for the two days we were there. It
was probably unnecessary, but I think it was a wise thing to do
under the circumstances.
Swent : I would think so. You might mention the things that you have as
mementos of that occasion.
Lowell: Oh, they insisted on giving me the academic robe, and the ceremony
involves a colored ribbon and a medallion hung around your neck,
which makes you a member of the university. What s it called?
Swent: I think in English it s cloister. Claustro in Spanish.
Lowell: Claustro. My wife, who is better informed about things like this
than I am, said that it had a kind of a religious group
connotation, she thought. In the conversation in the ceremony,
they said something which indicated that now that I was a member
of a claustro that I could participate in similar ceremonies as
one of the robed, serious-looking gentlemen standing in a row
[chuckles]. I received a diploma or certificate on parchment,
certifying me as being Doctor Honoris Causa and lots of
photographs. There were three professional photographers. I came
back with fifty or a hundred prints of photographs. It was all a
very pleasant experience.
John Guilbert, Consultant on Theoretical Aspects of Kalamazoo
Geology
Swent: Very exciting. So now we have to go back and retrace the path that
led to that eminence. Yesterday you had been talking about the
discovery of the Kalamazoo ore body. You haven t said anything
about Professor [John] Guilbert, and I thought you might want to.
Lowell: The discovery of the Kalamazoo ore body was really related to my
theoretical ideas about the concentric zoning of porphyry copper
deposits. There was also a structural interpretation which was
important in it, but the more important part was realizing the
concentric zoning idea and identifying evidence of it first in the
San Manuel ore body, which was a mirror image half of the
96
Kalamazoo ore body, and then finding evidence of the zoning in old
drill holes and outcrops in the vicinity of the location of the
Kalamazoo ore body.
John Guilbert didn t become involved in the project until
after the discovery had already happened.
Swent : Was he one of your teachers when you were in school?
Lowell: No. John Guilbert is about the same age as I . He was an
acquaintance. I felt that the deposit required more academic
documentation than I was able to supply. John Guilbert had worked
in the Anaconda research laboratory at Butte, Montana, for a
number of years, and he was already at that time an expert on
silicate alteration and porphyry copper deposits. I asked him if
he would care to do consulting work for Quintana on the
theoretical aspects of Kalamazoo, and he agreed.
John is a very enthusiastic, energetic fellow and is an
inspiring teacher. He has been the standout ore deposits professor
of the University of Arizona and is internationally famous. In the
course of our meetings on the documentation of the description of the
deposit, we decided to compare notes and build the Kalamazoo example
into a composite, general model of porphyry copper deposits, using--
as it were--his academic background and my experience background
because at that point I had looked at a lot of porphyry copper
deposits in the field. And so we decided to do this.
A Benchmark Paper on Concentric Zoning in Copper Deposits
Lowell: We put together a paper which turned out to be much more successful
than we had thought it would be at the time. For quite a few years,
it was the primary reference for geology of porphyry copper deposits.
Swent: This is the paper in Economic Geology.
Lowell: In Economic Geology. This paper has been referenced in other
papers probably several hundred times, and it has been translated
into Japanese and Chinese and turned out to be a kind of a
benchmark publication, probably largely because of the timing.
There were similar papers published a year or two later, but this
was the first one to pull all this information together. John and
I have since collaborated on several other, shorter, less
important papers and worked together on other projects.
:
J. David Lowell and John M. Guilbert, "Lateral and Vertical
Alternation-Mineralization Zoning in Porphyry Ore Deposits," Economic
Geology. Vol. 65, No. A, June-July, 1970.
97
Swent : You have done a number of papers for Economic Geology, and you
were an editor later on. Do you want to talk about your
association with that?
Lowell: Oh, sure. I m not sure how many Economic Geology papers I have
written, but there s probably half a dozen all together. I have
published fifty papers in total. There was a period in the 1970s
when I was a member of an informal group of theoretical
geochemists that met for conferences on the average of once every
year or two.
Associate Editor of Economic Geology
Swent: How did this come about?
Lowell: Well, just casually. I m not sure how it was really done. Some
of the people in this group were Hal Helgeson in California and
Paul Barton in USGS ; Hugh Barnes and Wayne Burnham, Penn State;
Heinrich Holland, Charlie Meyer, and others. Several of the
meetings were in the form of Gordon or Penrose conferences. One
was a meeting at Princeton and one at Penn State and a couple of
meetings in Massachusetts. In the course of this, I became
acquainted with Brian Skinner, who was the editor for many years
of Economic Geology, and I was invited to be a member of the
editorial board and associate editor of Economic Geology, which I
did for five years. I think that s the term of this editorial
board. It consisted of reviewing papers submitted to Economic
Geo_Zogy. I also wrote reviews of other publications in other
journals .
I might talk a little bit about my involvement with the
Society of Economic Geologists. I ve never been on committees or
been an officer of SEG, but I was a Thayer Lindsley distinguished
lecturer for the SEG.
Thayer Lindsley Lecturer for Society of Economic Geologists
Swent: What did this involve?
Lowell: Well, it involved giving lectures in universities in--I believe,
all my talks were in the U.S. One was a university in Florida,
another in Colorado. There was a third one in Massachusetts.
98
Swent : Did you give the same lecture?
Lowell: Well, the job involves preparing two lectures and give one or the
other of them. I was also given the Society of Economic
Geologists silver medal for excellence in mineral exploration in
1983 as a result of the La Escondida discovery.
Canadian Mining and Metallurgical Society Distinguished Lecturer
Lowell: Another kind of similar type of lecturer job was the Canadian
Mining and Metallurgical Society distinguished lectureship, which
involved giving lectures. I think I lectured in five or six
universities in eastern Canada: Ontario and Quebec. That was at
about the same time.
Swent: Did you do these lectures yourself, or did you have help with
them?
Lowell: I did them myself. I prepared the lectures. They were all
related to porphyry copper geology, which was in vogue at that
time .
Swent: How did you feel about all this lecturing?
Lowell: Well, for many years, it was a painful process to give lectures.
I m not a talented public speaker. But I ve become better at it
and a great deal more relaxed. I have given talks in lots of
different parts of the world. I ve given talks in Australia and
China and Japan and Mexico and Peru and Chile and France and
England and finally have half -learned how to do it.
Swent: What is the rationale behind these lectures?
Lowell: Well, different things, but there s a lot of writing of articles
in the geology and exploration business, and some of the talks--
the most recent talk in England was at a meeting of the Rio Tinto
exploration group. It was an exploration management group, and
their exploration program was so large that that still included
sixty people. I have given similar talks to the exploration group
for Cyprus Minerals and Western Mining, from Australia. And I ve
been an invited speaker in a number of meetings.
Swent: Is there a benefit to you from these experiences?
Lowell: You know, I think it s a very good education to have to write a
paper and organize your thoughts and do library research. As far
99
as professional advertising, my feeling is that in the earlier
stages of my career, the talks were ve.ry useful to sort of present
my name to the industry. I think in recent years it s a little
questionable as to whether I received any benefit of that sort.
That s the rationale.
I ve never been very academically oriented. I don t have a
great deal of sympathy with university activities and politics and
so forth, but I have been very interested in applied science and 1
have devoted a lot of time to trying to convert scientific ideas
into something that works in a practical way in the field.
Probably the majority of my effort in this area has been private
work that didn t necessarily result in publications or lectures.
Swent : This might be a place just to mention something the word
"networking" is so popular now--is there any local club or group
that has been particularly helpful to you in which you ve been
active, for meeting people? Something like the Geologists Society
or something that meets locally? Or even a country club.
Lowell: Well, that also has evolved during my career. There was a period,
maybe twenty years, in which I was an active member of the Arizona
Geologic Society, which has a meeting and a talk once a month, and
I was president of the society for one year and gave several talks
myself there. That meets in Tucson, and 1 haven t attended a
meeting for quite a few years because: (A) it s kind of difficult
to make the round trip to Tucson for an evening meeting; and (B)
Tucson has faded in importance as an exploration center, and it s
really no longer very important at all. So the group and also the
subject of the talks are no longer as interesting as they once
were .
Building a Reputation: Knowledge More Important than Advertising
Swent: I m thinkingand we ll get back in a minute to your career path--
but when you were beginning, out on your own, I was wondering how
you made contacts and how the word of mouth was spread about you.
Was there a meeting, some sort of venue around here where people
found out about you?
Lowell: That s a difficult question to answer. The mechanism that brings
offers to do consulting work to a consultant is very much
dependent on personal knowledge and not on advertising. 1 didn t
understand that in the early stages of my consulting career and
tried to get the word around about my availability and my
competence .
100
Swent: How did you do that?
Lowell: Well, I had a professional card in Mining Engineering magazine,
the journal of AIME. I also wrote letters to prospective clients.
After I had been in business several years by myself, I joined
forces, first with Jack Still, who was a mining engineer, and
later with Jack and his son, whose name was Arthur Still, who was
a geologist. They have both passed away since. Art Still and I
once went to considerable trouble to put together a brochure
describing our experience and capabilities and where we had done
work and so forth, and had one or two hundred of these brochures
published. My feeling afterwards was it was a total waste of time
and effort. It didn t accomplish anything.
The way that work actually materializes is through word of
mouth and personal contacts. Much of consulting geological work
is really more contract work than consulting in the sense of
advice. They look around for who they think can do the work and
is available. And that s how it happens.
Swent: Fortunately, in this country you don t get shot if you guess
wrong.
Lowell: [laughs heartily). Well, that fellow in the Dominican Republic a
good argument can be made that he might have deserved to be shot,
[laughter] I know a few in North America that fall in the same
category [laughs].
Swent: It seems to me it s kind of a chicken and egg thing, though. You
do difficult work to develop a reputation, but you can t develop
it unless you get some chances to do the work.
Lowell: That s right. And I think in my career I created the chances,
with malice aforethought, by using some of my own time to become
knowledgeable about known ore deposits in North America and
elsewhere.
Swent: These visits that you made to mines you think were very important.
Lowell: Yes, I think so.
Swent: In your own education and also in contacts that you made?
Lowell: Well, probably more in my own education than in the contacts.
It s a talking point to say, "Gosh, I visited fifty porphyry
copper mines," but the more important thing is that some ideas
have gradually seeped into your head [chuckles] from seeing
similarities and differences between a large number of examples.
101
The Importance of Mapping the Mullion Structure and Concentric
Zones
Swent : You mentioned the mullion structure that you became aware of when
you did the maps. Is this not visible from observation?
Lowell: Well, basically, no. These are large grooves in the San Manuel
Fault that might be fifty feet wide and ten feet deep. That fault
line is so chaotic when you look at it that you can t tell
anything except that there s a big, hundred-foot-thick zone of
mashed rock [chuckles].
Swent: Is there surface evidence of zoning?
Lowell: Well, this is not zoning. This is the grooves caused by a big
block of rock sliding over another big block.
Swent: I guess that s another question, the concentric zoning. Is this
something arrived at, or is it visible on the surface?
Lowell: It s visible, but there s a little problem of a flea mapping the
surface of an elephant.
Swent: I see. It s just that it s so huge.
Lowell: It s so huge you have to put your observations down on a map and
then view the map. You can t see it very well on an individual
outcrop. Both of these features were missed by the USGS
geologists who spent months or years studying the area.
Swent: Both of which features?
Lowell: Both the concentric zoning and the mullion structure in the San
Manuel Fault. So they were obvious if you were looking for them,
but they weren t obvious if you weren t looking for them.
Swent: So it was your synthesis of these things that was so important.
Lowell: Yes.
The Vekol Hills Project, Southern Arizona
Swent: Let s get back to the list. Where did you go from Kalamazoo?
That was kind of a hard act to follow, wasn t it?
102
Lowell: Yes. As it happens, both of these--
II
Lowell: --projects sort of crystallized at the same time. One was
Kalamazoo, and the other was the Vekol Hills project in the Papago
Indian reservation in southern Arizona. The Vekol project I was
involved in on behalf of Newmont Mining Company, and the way that
came about was--for a couple of years, Newmont was my principal
consulting client, and most of my work for Newmont was consulting
in the sense of being given an assignment to map an area or
evaluate a deposit. I was working for Bob Fulton, who was vice
president in charge of exploration in New York. Newmont had a
relatively small staff of geologists and very few people who were
doing general exploration work. That was a slot that I fit in,
and Newraont asked me to evaluate the Lakeshore deposit, which was
later developed by Hecla Mining Company. It s also within the
Papago reservation.
While I was doing the work at Lakeshore--and I incidentally
recommended that they acquire Lakeshore and they declined to
acquire the property, which may or may not have been a mistake
because it later developed into a large copper ore body, but,
perhaps because of bad management decisions, it has never made a
significant profit.
But the Lakeshore project involved my becoming familiar with
that part of that district, and I suggested to Bob Fulton that I
expand my work and do a little bit of regional work, which I did.
In the course of doing this, I talked to a fellow whose name was
Mo Kaufman, who had a small company--! think it was out of Spokane
or somewhere that had obtained some kind of exclusive exploration
permit for part of the Papago reservation. His work was based
almost entirely on geophysics, which I have never felt was a very
effective way to look for porphyry copper deposits. But they had
anomalies and some limited geological and geochemical information
in two targets in the Papago reservation at the time I talked to
him. They had decided that neither one justified additional
investment, but he asked me if I would be interested in taking
over their option or permit with the Indians.
I looked at the data, and both of these looked mildly
interesting, and I called Bob Fulton and asked him if Newmont was
willing to take over this project, which basically cost them very
little but required immediate decision because the deadline was a
week or two later. Bob Fulton was a very decisive fellow. By
this time we had had some period of association and kind of
understood how each other thought, and he said, "Yes, do it." So
I did, and did a little mapping job. This wasn t a typical big
103
company, exhaustive project. I think the total time I devoted to
each project was probably less than a week of field work.
Swent: Did you do this yourself?
Lowell: Yes. I did it by myself, with no field assistant. In the case of
the Vekol mapping, I slept on the ground in a sleeping bag in an
old mine working [chuckles] while I was there. It was kind of
hard-core type of exploration work. At that time, I had some
understanding, but an imperfect understanding, of porphyry copper-
silicate alteration and peripheral zoning, and I saw some evidence
of that at Vekol. The Vekol ore body is in a quartzite rock, a
porphyry intrusion into quartzite, but the outcrop is just
quartzite. Quartzite consists of 90 percent quartz (silica), and
when it is subjected to phyllic alteration, which is quartz
sericite alteration, it doesn t make a very obvious change in the
texture and appearance of the rock.
So this was a tough one to map. Most of the area was
covered by postmineral rocks. But in the course of mapping in a
very small gully in an inaccessible place, I crawled down the
gully and I found a postmineral dike, something like a fresh
andesite dike. But the reactive fresh feldspar crystals in the
andesite had precipitated some malachite, secondary oxide copper
mineral. This was the deciding clue for the Vekol deposit, which
wasn t coincident with the geophysical anomaly but near it. This
small occurrence of oxide copper indicated that copper was
migrating in the groundwater and had been precipitated by the
reactive feldspar in the andesite dike.
Then I went back and puzzled over the quartzite outcrop, and
there was some stockwork of veinlets that looked more significant
in view of some known copper. So I said, "Let s go for it." I
wrote a report. Turned down the other prospect. Wrote a report
recommending a drill hole in the Vekol deposit. Newmont sent a
geologist who lived in a house trailer in the summer in the Papago
reservation, where it s very hot and very far from town, and he
was very unhappy [laughs].
Swent: What was his name?
Lowell: He later became a state geologist in Nevada. I don t remember his
name. Joe somebody or other [chuckles]. They drilled a hole that
went into a chalcocite ore body under the quartzite outcrop. The
Vekol deposit has something like two hundred million tons of .7 or
.8 percent copper, and with modern leaching, solvent extraction-
electrowinning technology, it would be a very attractive, medium-
sized copper mine.
104
But subsequent to our project, the Papago Indians have
become more closed and reclusive and hostile to outside
development on the reservation. I think Newmont could have
developed a mine at the time, but they let it sit around, by big
company habit, for a number of years, and when they went back, the
Papagos in effect said no, we won t let you develop the mine.
Copper Versus Saguaro Fruit
Lowell: There was an interesting little sidelight to that. When they went
back, they had a very carefully orchestrated presentation to the
local community council of the Papagos for that district of the
reservation. They had a community hall, which was, if I remember
correctly, sort of octagonal shaped, like a Navajo hogan and in an
isolated part of the reservation. The Newmont people from New
York and Denver and other big cities had a number of charts and
enlarged aerial photographs and film clips, and several different
people presented their portions of the proposal for most of the
morning, to demonstrate how pleasant it would be to have a mine
there and how many Papagos would be employed and how happy they
would be and how happy the other Papagos would be with their
newfound royalties.
The Papagos didn t say anything at all, and when the
presentation was finished, they got up and walked out. The
Newmont group thought that they were having a caucus outside, and
they waited and nothing happened for half an hour and then an
hour, and then somebody went out and looked out the door. What
had happened is that the Papago council members had gone outside,
gotten in their pickups, and gone home [laughs), without saying a
word [laughter].
Swent : Oh, dear. Were you there?
Lowell: No, I wasn t there, but I was told that [laughs]. And that was
the end of Vekol. So it was a scientific success, but a practical
failure [chuckles].
Swent: Did this personally disappoint you when this happened?
Lowell: Yes, yes. It was disappointing to me. I think the Indians made a
mistake in not allowing the mine to be developed. They had agreed
to the exploration contract. One of the arguments I later heard
that came back was that one of the council members said that that
was a particularly good place to harvest saguaro fruit, and the
number of saguaro cactuses in the mine area times yearly
105
Swent :
Lowell:
production of fruit would be worth maybe one-one thousandth or
one-one millionth of what the value of the jobs and the production
from the mine would be worth. But that was the sort of thinking
that they had.
A different way of looking at it.
Yes. I guess they were buying peace and quiet [laughs].
Kalamazoo Sold to Magma; Relations with Newmont
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell
Both the Kalamazoo and Vekol discoveries were in 1965. I was
heavily involved at Kalamazoo for two more years, until 1967. At
that time, we completed an ore reserve calculation and a
feasibility study. Quintana decided, probably correctly, that it
wasn t a proper job for an oil company to develop this large
underground mine, and they invited various major companies to look
at the data, including Newmont, which operated the San Manuel
deposit as Magma Copper Company. Newmont decided to make a cash
offer for the deposit, and they offered $27 million, which in
1967, was maybe equivalent to close to $100 million now. Quintana
elected to sell it lock, stock, and barrel to Magma.
Years later, Magma developed the deposit, and it s now the
principal source of ore for the San Manuel mill and smelter. It s
a deep underground mine, and the price of copper is lower in terms
of constant dollars now, so it isn t at the moment a great
success, although I think for the previous several years they made
a good profit from mining at Kalamazoo and will in the future.
Now, both Magma and Utah have been acquired by BHP, so they are
all in the same stable now.
That s right.
Was there ever any indication that Newmont- -well, how should I put
this?--was there any ill feeling to you for Quintana getting it
and not Newmont?
Well, they didn t tell me that they did, but I m sure there may
have been some. The staff at San Manuel had been very friendly to
me. A funny little incident occurred after we had drilled a
number of holes. I talked to the Quintana management and said,
"You know, I think it would be a good idea to let Newmont know
what is happening so that they will have some lead time to get
106
Swent :
Lowell :
their wits together in case they want a joint venture with us on
the deposit."
At that point, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there
was nobody in Quintana that knew anything about mining [chuckles],
and it didn t look like a very good idea for them to jump into a
major, difficult mining operation themselves, on short notice. So
Bob Fulton and Arthur Brant came to Tucson, and I think one of
them had called me and told me that they were going to be here. I
met them for breakfast. They knew that we were drilling holes
there, and I said to Bob, "I think we ve found the other half of
the San Manuel ore body."
They asked me what we had found in the drill holes, and I
told them. They said, "What led you to drill in this spot?"
I said, "Well, we relogged the Pursell churn drill holes,
and I had contoured the Schwartz data," and they both
simultaneously said, in horror, "Contoured the Schwartz data?!"
[laughs] "My God, why didn t we do that fifteen years ago?"
So there was reasonably amicable feelings, I think, with
Newmont . I think they correctly deduced that I was kind of a
friendly go-between between Quintana and Newmont, which eventually
led to Newmont s buying it.
It might well have gone another way.
ugly situation.
It could have been a rather
It could have been, yes. But it really wasn t. I did at least
some later work for Newmont, and they in part later funded my
Covered Area Project.
[In 1970 I received the Daniel Jackling Award from the SHE
division of the AIME [American Institute of Mining Engineers].
This award was a result of the Kalamazoo discovery and is the
AIME s most prestigious award for a mining engineer or geologist.
I gave a lecture entitled, "Copper Resources in 1970," which among
other things predicted future copper production and copper prices.
Within a couple of years I was very sorry to have made these
predictions. ]
2
:
This paragraph was added by Mr. Lowell during the editing process,
David Lowell and Peter Davies in San Juan Province, Argentina, 1969.
Qanat shaft in Iran, 1970: David Lowell with shaft sinking workers,
Shaft is part of a qanat gravity water development system.
La Caridad, Mexico, March 14, 1970. From left to right:
John Guilbert, C.E. Beverly, J.D. Lowell, J. de la Luz,
B.E. Kilpartrick, R.M. Corn, and J. Contla.
Sinoloa, Mexico: exploration by horseback, 1974.
David Lowell at a copper prospect in Jamaica, 1977.
Camp at Maria Rosa prospect, north of Collahuasi, Chile, 1982,
107
X DOING HALF-TIME CONTRACT EXPLORATION
A Unique Career Formula in the Industry
Lowell: In the late 1970s, as a result of the Kalamazoo project, I hit on
a formula which I really followed for all of the next fifteen or
twenty years, and the formula was to keep one foot in the
consulting business but to also do contract exploration. And my
formula was, and maybe still is, kind of unique in the industry.
It was first to spend nominally 50 percent of my time doing
contract projects and 50 percent doing consulting work.
The contract projects were projects that I dreamed up and
decided, "Well, what should a major company be doing in Arizona,
or in Chile, or in Peru, or in Mexico?" And I figured this out
and said, "Well, if they did A, B and C, they d have a good chance
of finding a large copper deposit." And then I asked myself,
"Which company should be doing this?" And I came up with the
answer, "Well, Kennecott or Asarco or Amax or Utah." Utah s name
progressively changed from Utah Construction to Utah
International, and I think there was another name.
Swent : Utah Construction and Mining.
Lowell: Utah Construction and Mining, and eventually they were bought by
General Electric and then by BHP. But I went through this
process, and then I
Swent : Excuse mewhat s the difference between contract exploration and
consulting? What was the differentiation there?
Lowell: Well, the contract exploration is--my brand of contract
explorationwas to plan the basis for a project and then plan the
nuts and bolts as to how it should be done, develop a budget, all
before the major company has any involvement, and then bring this
project to them and say, "Okay, guys, you put up seven hundred and
fifty thousand or a million or a million and a half or two million
108
dollars a year to finance this program, which I will manage, and I
will get paid for my time plus a finder s fee."
I ve had a number of these projects, but a typical format is
that we will set up a technical committee and every three months
we will meet with you or submit a fairly detailed report and say,
"This is what we have done in the last three months, and this is
what we plan to do in the next three months. Speak now or forever
hold your peace." I have had maybe a half a dozen of these
contracts, and they have spanned close to twenty years. The large
company has almost never objected or offered their own suggestions
on how it is done.
Mineral Exploration: Drilling, Land Acquisition Important Too
Swent : Did you build up your own staff for this?
Lowell: Yes. I really did. There have been several geologists that have
worked for me off and on. A couple of key members of the team are
a landman and a drilling specialist. The land work and the
drilling supervision sometimes loom larger than the geologic
input. Mineral exploration is something that is often erroneously
referred to as geological in nature. Geology is only one part of
the picture. Some of the best explorationists that 1 have known
have not had a geology degree or even studied geology in school.
Spud Huestis in western Canada probably acquired more mines than
any other individual-
Lowell: Spud died ten years ago. He was a high school graduate who was a
prospector and promoter in western Canada. He had a very
impressive talent for recognizing mineral prospects that might be
potential mines. At one time, I tallied eight or ten mines that
he was really responsible for developing. A fellow in Arizona,
who was president of Banner Mining Company, Allen Bowman, had a
similar record. He was responsible for the company acquiring
several major copper deposits, including Twin Buttes and Rosemont,
and one other, whose name I forget, in southern Arizona and one
near Lordsburg, New Mexico.
The point of this is that it isn t as simple as getting a
Ph.D. in geology and leaving the university and saying, "Eureka!
This is where we should drill for an ore body." In fact, an
argument could be made the it s a handicap to have too much
academic background.
109
But getting back 1.0 my story, I had a drilling specialist
that had earlier worked for Newmont and worked a total of
something like twelve years for me, whose name is Bill Mounts.
Bill is also a non-college graduate but a very intelligent,
observant, capable guy who does miracles with drill rigs.
Swent : Where is he based, here in Tucson?
Lowell: Well, he for the past several years has worked for Barrick Gold
Company, and I ll mention him again when we talk about Pierina.
He, early in his career, learned about drilling, working for
Newmont at Carlin, Nevada, and then worked for me, and then he
returned for several years to Newmont and then to Barrick where he
is now living in La Serena, Chile.
The land work in connection with exploration projects is
sometimes absolutely crucial toit s very blessed to figure out
the geology and find an ore body, but it s more blessed still to
acquire the ore body [chuckles]. Probably the majority of the
major discoveries that I have been involved with also involved
some controversy or sometimes even lawsuits in connection with the
ownership of the property. This was true, as I mentioned, at
Kalamazoo; and at Vekol, more effective negotiation with the
Indians would have allowed the ore body to be developed into a
mine .
At Escondida, there was a long wrangle about ownership that
involved the lawsuit after I was no longer involved in the
project. This also included the nearby Zaldivar deposit; and the
San Cristobal deposit that we found and was later developed as a
gold mine in Chile was more a triumph in signing up the property
owners than the geological work, I think. The Leonor deposit in
Chile revolved around ownership problems. So it s a consistent
theme to have difficulty in acquiring title.
Swent: Would you like to detail those problems now or wait till you come
to each one in turn?
Lowell: I ll talk about them when we talk about the exploration projects.
The Advantage of a Small Organization
Lowell: But getting back to my exploration team, part of my strategy in
doing exploration is to try to do it on as low a budget as possible
and as low a profile as possible and as small an investment in
secretaries and offices and vehicles and the window dressing that
110
Swent :
Lowell
is commonly used in major company exploration. For example, right
now I m doing a project, a joint venture, with Rio Tinto Mining
Company, the former RTZ, the largest mining company in the world.
We have two parallel programs of roughly the same scope going on
in Chile. In our program, we have two vehicles; Rio Tinto has
fourteen. We have a little office above a car rental place in
Santiago, two-room office; and they have a palatial office in
Santiago on two floors [chuckles] of a high-rise building and
another large office with thirty people in Antofagasta.
I have always felt that a modest, small approach is really
better and it s better if nobody knows you re working and notices
you. So I have always tried to put more than 50 percent of the
budget into direct exploration drilling costs and less than 50
percent into the everything else, including geologic mapping and
head office and travel and infrastructure and so on. In Arizona
for a long time we were using one and a half geologists, and I was
the half that was working half-time on the project; and one
drilling specialist and one or two field assistants, samplers, and
one secretary or one half-time secretary and one part-time
draftsman. And that was it. It was a pretty small, lean, mean
organization.
We have done the same thing in other countries, in Chile,
and some similar projects in Peru. On an early project I had four
senior Peruvian geologists working in the field. We didn t have a
full-time secretary, we didn t have an office, we didn t own a
typewriter, and we didn t have a bank account. I was paying for
things out of my hip pocket in Peru [chuckles). So it s a little
different world.
It obviously has succeeded.
Well, yes, through smartness or luckiness. It s a little
difficult to be sure.
The Covered Area Project; Casa Grande West, Arizona
Lowell: But this consulting and half-time contract work: I started doing
this with Quintana in Arizona, and in 1973 I put together a
program which we called the CAP, the Covered Area Project. It
continued for about five years, but the intensive part lasted for
three years, 1973 to 1976. You were asking if there was bad
feelings from Newmont . Newmont was the original funder of the CAP
Project, about eight years after the Kalamazoo discovery, so they
obviously didn t feel too cross about it.
Ill
Newmont originally signed ths contract with me. Then they
asked to bring in Hanna Mining Company to split the risk. Then a
year later Newmont essentially got totally out of the copper
business, and they bowed out of our project, which was a copper
project as it happened, only a couple of months before the Casa
Grande West discovery, which might have changed their mind.
Swent : This was here in Arizona.
Lowell: In Arizona. Hanna Mining Company brought in Getty Oil Company, so
the CAP was originally Newmont, then it was Newmont -Hanna, then it
was Hanna-Getty. Getty paid their bills, but there is some
question in my mind as to whether that was good luck or bad luck
that they became involved in Arizona and then later in Chile
because they tended to be a "disorg," somewhat in Arizona, and to
a greater degree in the Atacama project in Chile. Getty had the
same deficiency that Quintana had of almost total ignorance about
the mining business. But the Quintana people were basically
intending to be friendly and kind and fair. The head of the Getty
exploration group was a fellow named Sig Meussig, who probably
[chuckles] had none of the characteristics that 1 have listed as
group characteristics for Quintana. The result of this was that-
Well, I m getting ahead of myself. I ll go back to the
history of the CAP project. At the time, the logic for the
project was to use a more or less original mapping technique to
project silicate alteration zones and geochemical anomalies in
premineral outcrop under areas of postmineral cover, and then
drill scout holes on wide spacing to see if the alteration zone
could be extrapolated.
The annual budget was $750,000. We operated very cheaply
and efficiently, I think, and we had drilled twenty prospects. We
had drilledin two years, 73- 74--actually , it was two years
from the time the contract was signed until the Casa Grande West
project. We had drilled twenty targets, and we had drilled 120
individual drill holes that were rotary drill holes at that time.
And we had one strong smell of mineralization but no hits. The
twenty-first project was the Casa Grande West project. It was
based on the fact that we were aware that Asarco s Sacaton ore
body was bottomed on a flat fault, a large displacement, low dip-
angle fault, kind of along the lines of the San Manuel Fault, but
a flatter fault, almost horizontal. Part of my knowledge dated
back to earlier work in the district for Southwest Ventures and
Utah.
We were aware of the fact that some mineralization had been
found in scout drill holes in the Casa Grande Valley, and we were
aware of the fact that farmers had, in quite a number of water
112
wells in the valley, had found pebbles of oxide copper
mineralization from the holes that were drilled as water wells.
This relates back to my first article about mapping stream
directions in sedimentary rock.
Swent : How do you become aware of these kinds of things? Did you check
with water drillers?
Lowell: Oh, it s through conversations with geologists, with other
companies. It s kind of through--
Swent : I was wondering where these conversations take place.
Lowell: Oh, when you get together to have lunch or at geologic meetings or
telephone calls.
Swent: You say you knew there had been these things found in the Casa
Grande Valley. I m just wondering how you find out this sort of
thing.
Lowell: That s a good question. Our exploration at Casa Grande West was
maybe the fourth round in that area or the sixth round. It wasn t
a new idea that there might be another piece of this ore body. A
number of other companies had worked there. A typical habit of
exploration geologists is after they try something themselves and
it doesn t work, they chat with their friends about it afterwards.
That s where the first part of the information came from.
But our project was predicated on drilling scout holes, so
we had a little project to compile all the information we could
get on this area. It was actually one of our earliest projects in
the Covered Area Project. The twenty previous projects that we
drilled were the ones that at any given time we thought was the
most favorable, and so this project kept dropping to somewhere in
the middle of the pile but not being rejected. We finally got
around to the Casa Grande project, and we compiled all the
information from scuttlebutt and published information that we
could get. On that project, we even went so far as to go to the
county recorder and develop a chronological history of when mining
claims were staked and where and by whom in that area, so that we
had a historical record of where Asarco s interest was, for
instance, after they found that the Sacaton ore body was bottomed
by a fault. Asarco was the individual company that had been most
interested in that target area and had done the most work there.
Well, then I went back to my experience on the Colorado
Plateau in mapping directions of--ancient stream directions. We
had a program mapping along principally the east boundarythis
was the east side of the Santa Cruz River drainage. The Santa
113
Cruz River dies out and goes into a distributory network. It
probably originally connected with the Gila River near Gila Bend
but doesn t now; it just flows out into the valley and stops.
We mapped stream directions, and in the course of doing that
I talked to a friend whose name is Spade Cooley, who was a USGS
geologist based in Tucson for a while. He no longer is. I knew
that he had worked in the vicinity of Casa Grande, and I compared
notes on stream directions with him.
Swent : This is current streams or ancient streams?
Lowell: Ancient streams. Ancient but postmineral. The age of the
mineralization is approximately sixty million years old, and there
are outcrops of rocks that range from modern streams to streams
maybe fifteen million years old in that district. Spade told me
something which was very surprising, and that was that his work
suggested that the Santa Cruz River had reversed directions twice
in its history, that it had originally flowed from south to north,
and then it had flowed from north to south, and then it--it now
flows from south to north again.
So I took this information and went back to our plotting of
the locations where the copper pebbles had been found in the water
wells, which had not formed a very obvious pattern based on a
south-to-north flow, but they made a very neat pattern, a wedge-
shaped pattern, on the basis of a flow from north to south.
So on this basis, we went out to the key area and acquired
property. Some of the ground that we staked had originally been
staked by Asarco, and they had allowed their claims to lapse.
They later said, Well, we were interested in this area all along,
and you re just unethical latecomers and so on. But the evidence
really didn t support that because they had allowed their claims
to lapse.
So we went to this key area and drilled several holes and
immediately found evidence of porphyry copper mineralization. The
first hole intersected some leached capping, which is a material
over a porphyry copper deposit, from which the copper has been
leached and carried down to form a secondary enrichment blanket.
But there was no ore--we found weak copper mineralization but no
strong mineralization.
We moved around then. The trail got hotter and colder and
hotterwe were six miles from the nearest outcrop of pre-mineral
rock, so geologic mapping was of no use, but subsurface
interpretation was what we were doing. While we were doing this,
the "jungle telegraph" operated in the opposite direction and
114
Asarco heard that we were drilling out there, and they got excited
and came back out and started competing with us.
Our fifth hole was near ore grade, and our seventh hole was
definitely ore grade. It became apparent that one quarter-section
of land might be the center of the ore body and was possibly
available property. This was land in which the surface owner
owned both the surface rights and the mineral rights, and the
owner was a congressman from Dallas, Texas, who had bought the
land for speculation purposesnot for mineral but for real
estate .
Swent : What was his name?
Lowell: Don t remember. I may have that in my files. But we had borrowed
Bill Mounts from Newmont Mining Company, and then he elected to
resign from Newmont when they dropped out, and worked for me. We
had borrowed a land man from Getty, whose name was Don Nichols.
Don Nichols was a retired Marine Corps fighter pilot, a very
aggressive sort of guy, and--
Lowell: --an aggressive land man. Most of his land work, I think, had
been done in the oil business, but he was a good negotiator. We
called this congressman, who was a kind of a self-important,
successful politician, successful businessman, and he wouldn t
talk to us, so I asked Don to make a trip to Dallas and go to see
the congressman. He went to his office and explained to his
secretary who he was and what he wanted to see congressman Joe
Blow about, and the secretary talked to the congressman, and the
congressman said he was too busy, to go away. So Don Nichols sat
down in the chair in the reception room, and he waited there all
day [chuckles] until this guy came out, and then he buttonholed
him and, with his charm, was able to talk to him and make a deal.
So we got this quarter-section of ground, which turned out to--
Swent: Did you actually buy it or just get the rights to it?
Lowell: We bought it. And it turned out to contain something like 500
million tons of one percent copper, in one quarter of one square
mile. So we drilled through 1977. My experience in a number of
occasions is that when some prize is found in a project like this,
a major company develops almost irresistible urge to take the
project over themselves. So Hanna and Getty said, Thanks very
much, but we ll continue the development. Hanna was the operator
of the project. They spent $20 million drilling at Casa Grande
West, which was an excessive amount to spend. They drilled it
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Swent :
Lowell :
out on too-close spacing, trying to bend over backwards being
over-conservative .
But what should have been done at an early stage was sink a
shaft. The shallowest part of the ore body was 1,200 feet deep,
which would be an expensive shaft but they could probably have
done that for not much more than $20 million, and they would have
had the start of a mine. Instead of that, they drilled an
excessive number of drill holes and were never able to make the
hard decision to go underground.
This was partly because they were not a copper company and
didn t have experience in this, and Getty was almost totally
ignorant about mining. The net result of this was that they sat
around and agonized for years, and in the meantime real estate
development encroached, and the environmental movement became
stronger and stronger. It finally was no longer practical to try
to develop the copper mine there, and the ore body may be lost
forever. It s the most important copper discovery in Arizona in
the last thirty years, probably. So that s the long, sad history
of the Casa Grande West project.
So your contract was just to do the original work?
Yes. My contract said that a bonus would be paid when a minable
deposit was found, and we had a long argument about whether or not
this was a rainable deposit. It s kind of--beauty is in the eye of
the beholder. An aggressive company would have thought it was
minable, and a timid company would not. So they ended up paying
part of the bonus payment in my contract. I think if Newmont had
still been involved in the project and if they hadn t changed
their policy about mining copper, they would have probably gone
ahead and developed it.
Negative Effects of the Environmental Movement
Swent: This is the first time you ve mentioned the environmentalists,
course, really, the 1970s is when they began to be a major
influence in mining.
Lowell: I guess that s right. I never heard a date, but--
Swent : That s when the Environmental Protection Act was passed.
Lowell: Ah, yes. That s an interesting timing.
Of
116
Swent : The big force of the movement began in 1970.
Lowell: Well, it has resulted in almost eliminating all mineral
exploration in Arizona, which means that when the current mines
are depleted, there won t be a mining industry here, so they have
killed mining in Arizona and, for the most part, in the United
States. Maybe that won t be important during the next twenty
years, but I suspect it may be important from the viewpoint of the
longterm welfare of the country.
There s a group in Tucson called the Southwest Center for
Biologic Diversity. Its modus operandi is to get money from Ted
Turner and various foundations to file lawsuits. They have filed
ninety-nine suits and have active lawsuits against the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and they had a suit
against the University of Arizona. They have prevented the
construction of a high school in Tucson. They prevented the
reopening of the Ajo Mine by Phelps Dodge.
In that instance, Phelps Dodge got all of their permits
approved, and it was an old mining camp with minimal possibility
for damaging the environment, and they were using an
environmental-friendly concentration process. They had to build a
new high-tension power line from Gila Bend to Ajo, within the
easement of the existing power line. They got a permit from the
Bureau of Land Management to do this, and there was something like
a 120-day period for public input, and the Southwest Center for
Biologic Diversity, 119 days and twenty-three hours later, in
order to make it as difficult as possible for Phelps Dodge, filed
a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management to prohibit the
construction of this power line, which it s hard to think could
have caused any problem whatsoever. It would have been right
beside the other power line.
Shortly after that, Phelps Dodge announced that they weren t
going to reopen Ajo. This resulted in the loss of hundreds of
jobs in the mine and in service jobs related to the mine. So this
is how business is done. The head man for this Southwest Center--
his name is Suckling. They were previously centered in Silver
City, New Mexico, and Mr. Suckling was arrested for shoplifting
and fined, maybe put in jail for a while, so they moved from
Silver City and now Tucson is blessed with this creep [chuckles].
The Forest Service has more than fifty lawsuits that have
been filed against them by this group. If I sound like a rabid
anti-environmentalist, it s because [chuckles) I am.
Swent :
Right. It s a very difficult thing to work against, or with,
isn t it?
117
Lowell: That s right. It s very stylish to be in favor of clean air and
clean water, but 1 can t see how this is promoted by shooting down
high school construction and all the other silly things that are
being done. The Forest Service is really, as federal agencies go,
quite a reasonably good organization, and they ve been brought in
Arizona to almost a total halt by these lawsuits.
Swent : That s a shame .
Lowell: Well, where are we?
Swent: Have we reached a good stopping point?
Lowell: Yes.
[tape interruption]
A Project for Kaiser Aluminum in Argentina, 1969
Swent: All right. We re continuing now after our lunch break. We
finished talking about Casa Grande West, and now let s move on.
Lowell: I would like to backtrack a little bit, to a project I had in
Argentina in 1969 for Kaiser Aluminum Company.
Swent: How did that come about?
Lowell: Well, I think Kaiser contacted me pretty much out of the blue to
do a porphyry copper reconnaissance of the Argentine side of the
Andes .
Swent: Did you know anybody at Kaiser?
Lowell: I knew Joe Derek, who had previously been chief geologist at the
Morenci Mine for Phelps Dodge in Arizona.
This project lasted about six months. I probably only spent
three or four weeks of that time in Argentina. But I had a two-
man crew working on the project. It was largely aerial
reconnaissance, looking for alteration zones and following up on
field trips. The two people were Peter Davies, a Welshman who was
working for Kaiser, a mining engineer, and Clark Arnold, a
geologist who had previously worked for me in Arizona.
The first step in the project, which was a little self-
serving on my part, was a reconnaissance flight from Lima, Peru,
118
to Santiago, Chile, in a small plane, with the object of over
flying all of the known porphyry copper deposits and undeveloped
prospects that I could learn about. I did library research to
locate all of the prospects that I could find any record of.
Swent : What were some of them then?
Lowell: They were all of the southern Peru copper belt deposits: Cerro
Verde, Cuajone, Quellaveco, Toquepala. And in Chile, Quebrada
Blanca; at that time, the next one was Chuquicamata, and farther
south was El Salvador, and then Cerro Blanco, which is now called
Andina. At that time, El Teniente was called Braden, and there
was the Disputada Mine.
The trip began by chartering a twin-engined, fairly ancient,
small--! believe it was a Piper airplane that was flown by a
fellow named Capitan Perez, who was a moonlighting Peruvian army
pilot. We left Lima airport, flying towards Arequipa and Tacna,
Peru. Capitan Perez crossed himself, but did no pre-flight check
before he took off. One of the engines went out on the airplane,
and we had to make an emergency landing at Pisco, Peru, and spent
the night there and got the airplane running the next day and flew
down to Tacna, and went by automobile to Quellaveco and Toquepala.
I think we did not visit Cuajone but only overflew it.
We began to get intimations that we weren t going to be able
to arrange a permit, as we had been promised, to take the Peruvian
airplane into Chile. There is a long-standing animosity between
Peru and Chile, going back to the War of the Pacific in 1876. We
waited around for a couple of days in Tacna, and finally Capitan
Perez and our airplane disappeared, and we were left in Tacna. We
got a taxi and rode in the taxi to Arica, Chile.
I was the best Spanish speaker of our group of two, and did
most of the negotiating for us. I inquired around Arica and was
told that there was a Spanish immigrant to Chile who was a
blacksmith in Arica, who was a pilot and would fly us in a Club
Aereo (Flying Club) airplane. We talked to him, and he seemed
like an impressive, intelligent, sensible guy, so we made a deal
[chuckles] with some trepidation. It turned out very well. The
airplane was almost new, the pilot was much better than the army
pilot, and we flew from Arica, visiting some of the Quebrada
Blanca and other prospects.
Swent: You actually landed and visited them?
Lowell: No, we overflew most of them. We were trying to learn to
recognize porphyry coppers from the air. And we flew as far south
as to overfly Chuquicamata, and then we turned west to Antofagasta
119
and landed at Antofagasta. I called the Chuqui exploration
office. Chuqui at that time was owned by Anaconda. In the
meantime, the fixed-base operator at the airport told us that he
would, without any doubt, be there at seven o clock to fuel the
airplane. So we got up early in the morning and drove to the
airport in a taxi. We were waiting at seven o clock and no fuel
man. Eight o clock came and no fuel man. Then eight-thirty.
So I called the Anaconda exploration office. These
telephone calls were far from easy in isolated locations and no
easy way to pay for the calls and another language and so on. I
finally got the secretary in the exploration office who spoke
English, and I said, "I m terribly sorry and upset. This fellow
was supposed to be here at seven o clock, and it s almost nine."
She said, "Mr. Lowell, is this your first trip to Chile?"
[laughter]
We eventually got to Chuquicaraata, had a nice visit,
courtesy of Anaconda. Then--
I had written to Lew Gustafson, who was the geologist at
Salvador and had gotten no reply, so I assumed that we were not
going to get a visit to Salvador, but we overflew Salvador and
looked at it from the air and then turned west again to Chariaral,
a little town on the coast, and checked into the hotel. By the
time we got checked in, it was dark and it was a little, small
hotel in a remote location, and the lights were poor in the hotel
and we couldn t see very well. We ordered a scotch and were
sitting there chatting, and a fellow walked up to me, and he said
in Spanish, "Are you Mr. Lowell?"
I said, "Yes," thinking there s no one in the worldnot
anybody that knows that we should be [chuckles] in Chanaral. He
said, Well, Mr. Gomez (or some name I ve forgotten) wants to see
you down at some place name, and if you can come with me, we ll go
see Mr. Gomez.
I thought, "What kind of thing am I getting into?" [laughs]
So I decided what the heck, and got in the car and we drove down,
and it turned out that the place we were going to was Anaconda s
office in Chanaral, which was a kind of a port city for importing
--not a city; it s only a village, but a port for the Salvador
mine. Lew Gustafson had seen the airplane fly over and had
deduced, from the letter that he hadn t answered, that it was me.
And so he sent this fellow to tell me if I could come the next
day, we could get a mine tour [laughter].
120
We flew en down, looking at other prospects. I took
pictures and kind of studied the color zoning, which reflects the
alteration zoning. And finally got to Santiago, where we paid the
charter pilot, who had done a great job for us.
One of the things we spotted in this flight was an Inca or
pre-Inca temple on a high mountain peak, maybe at an elevation of
seventeen or eighteen thousand feet. We then went from Santiago
over to Buenos Aires and back to Mendoza to begin the project,
which consisted, as I mentioned, of largely aerial reconnaissance
work.
Swent : Was Kaiser Aluminum wanting to get into copper?
Lowell: They said they were, but when they actually got their chance, they
chickened out. The only prospect that came out of this program
was Bajo Alurabrera, which was a couple of years ago acquired by
Mt . Isa Mines in a joint venture with Rio Algom and I think North
Mines is the other one. Two of them were Australian companies.
I actually negotiated the deal with the entity that owned
Bajo Alumbrera called YMAD. Came back at the end of the project
with a deal signed by the Argentine government entity that was
supposed to own it. The Kaiser lawyer said that he doubted that
these people had the authority to make the deal, and on that basis
they (Kaiser) were going to back out of the deal. But it s a
large copper-gold ore body. Whether it would have been profitable
to mine at that time, I don t know. It was barely identified and
certainly not drilled out, and now it is the largest copper mine
in Argentina, but the current economics are uncertain.
Swent: How was Kaiser to deal with?
Lowell: Kaiser, aside from welching on buying the mine, were fine to deal
with. I later did some work for them in Iran also. I have
pleasant personal recollections of the Kaiser people.
Wild Experiences in Reconnaissance Flying
Lowell: We had some kind of wild experiences in the reconnaissance flying.
We ran into the same problem as with the Peruvian airplane, that
the aircraft maintenance was in general poor in Argentina, and
some of the pilots were not well trained. We were doing high-
altitude flying without oxygen, and sometimes flew as high as
18,500 feet, which is a little dangerous for the observer, but
it s very dangerous with respect to the pilot controlling the
121
airplane. And I remember on at least one occasion, we were having
mechanical problems with the airplane, and an ambulance raced down
the airstrip beside the airplane [chuckles].
II
Lowell: One humorous incident that occurred was when Peter Davies and
Clark Arnold were trying to charter an airplane in Chile by
telephone. Peter Davies had a heavy Welsh accent and was not very
good at speaking Spanish, but he understood it quite well. And
Clark is a fellow who is a natural mimic of sounds, and he was
able to pronounce Spanish words with a reasonably good accent, but
he wasn t able to understand it, listen to it. So they hit on a
scheme to work out a dialogue for renting an airplane. Clark
would read the statement from their end and quickly hand the phone
to Peter, who would listen to the reply and tell him what it was,
and then Clark would speak the next line [chuckles] on the
dialogue; and they succeeded in renting an airplane this way. But
there are lots of funny incidents.
Drawbacks of Mineral Exploration in Argentina
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell;
Swent:
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
1 concluded after that experience that I was not enthusiastic
about doing mineral exploration in Argentina, and 1 really never--
Why was that?
Well, the Argentineans, as somebody told me at the time, are very
good for singing and playing musical instruments and cooking, but
they are not very good people to actually get anything done or to
do business with [chuckles]. And they re also not very reliable
in business deals.
What was the situation in Argentina at that time?
Well, it was in a kind of a stable, average condition, with no
real political problems but no very productive government.
Do you think it might have improved since then?
I hope so [chuckles], but I m a little skeptical. There have been
some serious incidents by mining companies doing work in the last
couple of years. In the case of Bajo Alumbrera, for example, Mt .
Isa made what we thought was a very clear-cut deal, and I think by
now they ve invested the best part of a billion dollars--
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Swent: Billion?
Lowell: Billion. And just a few months ago the officials of the province
in which the deposit is located informed Mt . Isa, "By the way, we
would like something like a 5 percent royalty for the province, in
addition to the other terms," which is still being argued about,
but if they make it stick, it will probably make the operation
uneconomic. There were lots of little problems that we ran into
somewhat along the same lines, so it s not really a very good
place to do business.
Corruption and Doing Business in the "Third World"
Swent: At some point we might address the issue of bribes and doing
business in other countries, and perhaps you want to talk about
that.
Lowell: Well, in regard to corruption as it relates to doing business in
Third World countries, in my experience the worst place that I
have been is Mexico, and I have spent a short, unpleasant time in
Nigeria, which is also terribly corrupt. Nigeria is said to be
the worst country in the world for corruption. But the corruption
comes--! m sure there is some corruption in the United States or
anywhere else, but the asking for bribes is not very obvious in
most parts of the world. The corruption comes in in getting
governmental officials to agree to process your application and
things of that sort.
I have never paid a large bribe to anyone anywhere. In
Mexico I ve contributed my five dollars at the inspection station
to get my car passed through, which most other people are also
doing, but I sense the existence of this kind of corruption,
especially in countries like Argentina and Nicaragua and probably
Ecuador.
A Number of Little Problems in Peru
Lowell: Certainly, there is some of this in Peru, but it didn t appear to
be very widespread in Peru. Peru, in the four-year project that
we had, we came to the conclusion that the top levels of the
federal government were pretty straight-arrow, and the lowest
levels of government were relatively straight, but the corruption
123
showed up in the middle level. Things like provincial governments
and the Peruvian equivalent of middle-level judges.
Swent: How did it manifest itself? How were you aware of this?
Lowell: Well, we had a prospect in Peru that was owned by a gentleman--!
believe his name was Chavez. It was an attractive-looking gold
target. We tried to make a deal and got promises and a certain
amount of runaround, and then we went into sort of a careful,
almost detective study of the situation with Mr. Chavez, and we
found that he had madewe had a tentative deal for a 50 percent
interest in the prospect, with some hope of acquiring what we
thought was the other 50 percent. But it turned out that he had
made deals for a total of 250 percent of the ownership of his
property. Part of this was built around a lawsuit that he had
with another partner, and they had successively offered propinas
(tips) to the local judge, and the judge, upon receipt of a larger
tip, would announce that he thought either Mr. Chavez or his
antagonists were in the right, and the take of the judge gradually
built up over a series of months. That was the worst example that
we ran into.
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent:
Lowell :
What was the outcome finally?
Well, I don t know. One of the five 50-percent interests was
owned by Mr. Chavez s estranged wife. At one point, both Mr.
Chavez and the wife were put in jail [chuckles].
But you backed out of it .
We backed out about the time that we learned there was 250 percent
out. But we had other little problems of that sort. Peru, at the
time of our project, had just adopted a new mining code, which in
many respects is one of the simplest and most effective anywhere
in the world. They had divided the whole country up into one-
kilometer square blocks, on the basis of UTM coordinates.
UTM is what?
The "M" is military,
coordinates .
Universal something-or-other military
I can look it up. [Universal Transverse Mercator]
It s a kind of international coordinates system. Each kilometer-
square block was given a number. This was computerized, and each
number (square kilometer) was available for something equivalent
to an unpatented mining claim by payment of two dollars per
hectare, or two hundred dollars for a square kilometer. In
12A
Swent :
Lowell
Swent:
Lowell
theory, you can go into a mining office, ask for a certain number,
like 1753, and they would punch it into the computer and they
would say It s available, and you could pay your $200 and
immediately have priority to have mining rights on that square.
Or, if someone else had it, they would tell you that.
But the flaw in this system was the old claims that were not
filed on the basis of north, south, east, west kilometer squares.
We noticed that these old claims had a strong tendency to float
around, like plate tectonics plates [chuckles], depending on the
part of the district that a stranger was interested in. There
were lots of problems on that score. We found some evidence of
collusion between property owners and officials in local mining
offices. These are the things that--
Collusion in what sense?
Well, passing of information about other claims and a getting
togetherone fellow would say, "Pancho, it would really be very
helpful to me if my ABC claim could fly about three hundred meters
to the north, where Barrick Gold is getting ready to have a
drilling project." The appropriate coordinates might appear in
the records to take care of this, and presumably some money or
obligation would pass between the two Peruvians.
So Barrick would have to pay a higher price?
Yes, they would have to buy the claim, whereas otherwise they
wouldn t have to.
Swent: I see.
Lowell: We had a number of little problems like that, but on balance Peru
seemed to me to be a place that was very possible to do business
in. Peru, in my opinion, is a much better environment than
Argentina and probably better than Mexico also.
Chile Was a Very Straight Place, But Has Deteriorated
Lowell: In Chile there is a certain amount of this going on, maybe at
about the same level as the United States or maybe it s a little
worse than the United States. My early work in Chile was done
during the period of the Pinochet government. During that time,
Chile was really a very straight place.
Swent: It was a military government, wasn t it?
125
Lowell: It was a military junta government. The laws were obeyed, and the
laws were enforced, and it was a good environment for doing
business. I might add that I never saw a single instance of human
rights violation myself or a first-party report of human rights
violation under the Pinochet government. Pinochet just--as a
little soapbox additionbut Pinochet was kept in power by a
plebescite eight years after the junta took over the government,
winning 70 percent of the popular vote. The transparency of these
plebescites was certified by outside observers. The first time
that he lost public support, he retired as president as had been
specified in the constitution. In my opinion, he did a very good
job as president. Did not enrich himself. There was little to no
corruption in the Pinochet government.
But we noticedwell , after he went out, the level of
corruption noticeably increased. People started asking for
bribes. The law and order situation deteriorated. Santiago went
from being a very safe place to walk through at night, to a
dangerous place.
Swent : When was this?
Lowell: Oh, it was about, roughly, seven or eight years ago.
Geographical Variations in Corruption in Chile
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell ;
The other interesting thing about corruption in Chile is the
central and southern part of Chile has been Chilean since the time
of the revolution against Spain, but the northern maybe one-
quarter of the country, from Antofagasta north, was captured in
the War of the Pacif ic--part of it from Peru and part from
Bolivia. It has a different ethnic makeup and also different
traditions in terms of population and so forth. Even during the
Pinochet period, Arica, which is the northernmost city, was
understood to be a difficult place from the standpoint of honesty
and fair dealings. It s more so now. That s kind of a geographic
variation in corruption within one country.
You get into smuggling, of course, in border towns always,
seems to be kind of a given at a border town, doesn t it?
That s right. And you see the same thing here in Nogales,
Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora.
It
126
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell :
So that s a little different from other kinds of corruption. It s
still corruption, but it s a specialty, I guess, a subset
[chuckles] of corruption.
We had a group of mining claims intentionally misfiled by the
mining court clerk in Arica and a set covering the same area
inserted in place of ours in the name of a friend of the clerk,
which is certainly an example.
So what do you do in a case like that?
Well, we had a suit, which we lost. We eventually had to make
peace with the other claimants and give them part ownership in the
property. But it was an unpleasant experience.
Yes, indeed.
I was talking earlier about land men. That s the sort of problem
that you hope a capable land man will avoid in working on your
behalf.
So that isn t a very coherent discussion of corruption,
but-
Well, it was apropos of your experience in Argentina. So you have
never gone back to Argentina.
No, 1 haven t. 1 recently reviewed a property that had been
explored by a large company and finally bowed out.
Looking for Bargains in the Mining Industry
Swent: Was it at their invitation that you reviewed it?
Lowell: Yes. It was a major company that had had a drilling project and
had found some ore but not enough to be of interest to them. In
fact, two of these boxes I m sitting beside are data from this
project. They invited me to look at it from the standpoint of a
smaller miner with lower standards, but it didn t fit with my
objective there.
A friend of mine once made the remark that the biggest
bargains that are ever encountered in the mining industry are
mining properties that major mining companies decide, for company
political reasons, to drop. And they can t wait to get rid of the
property when that kind of decision is made. They may even pay
127
you [chuckles] to take the property. I have, in my career, looked
for bargain opportunities of this sort.
Swent : But this wasn t one.
Lowell: This wasn t one. The number of mineral prospects that actually
develop into mines is very small, and nobody has a specific,
accurate figure. I have a number of friends in Japanese mining
companies, and one of the vice presidents from Mitsubishi told me
once that the Japanese rule of thumb is that there are three mines
that come out of a thousand good mineral prospects, or one in
three hundred and thirty-three. I ve heard numbers like one in
five hundred, but it s all just a guess, but there are very few
that actually make it.
Expert Witness for the Arizona Highway Department
Lowell: Let s see. One other thing that happened about the same time as
Kalamazoo and Vekol Hills was I was selected to be an expert
witness on a continuing basis for the Arizona Highway Department
in suits involving mineral properties. I ended up being a witness
in something like eight different lawsuits on the side of the
assistant attorney general, who was defending the suits for the
State of Arizona. This was a very different kind of activity from
anything I had done before, but it turned out to be exciting and
many times a lot of fun.
The assistant attorney general that I worked with mostly--
name was Stanley Z. Goodfarb. Stan was a very good trial lawyer,
and we won in every suit that I was involved in. I felt that the
reason for the high success rate was hard work. Stan would
rehearse me for a couple of days before the suit and write endless
series of hypothetical questions and answers, and answers that I
couldn t make I would go to the library and look up, and then I
would make hypothetical questions for the other side s expert
witness. Every time we got in the court, it was a rout. We knew
the answers, and they didn t, and so we would win. This was a
little side interlude in my mining career.
Swent: What sorts of suits were they?
Lowell: Well, they were suits in which a highway alignment crossed mining
claims, or I remember in one case a gravel pit was said to be
really pozzolan, which is a relatively valuable material that is
used in cement manufacture. In another case, riprap, which are
blocks of broken stone that are used to reinforce road grades the
128
riprap contractor asked for special conditions on his contract
because the rock wouldn t break the way the highway engineer said
it was supposed to break. Things of this sort.
A Frightening Accident in an Arizona Mine
Lowell: Let s see. Somewhere along the line, I was involved in a mine
accident. That was, I believe, shortly after I left the employ of
Utah Construction Company. I was working for them as a consultant
with the Utah geophysicist whose name was Don Hansen. We were
looking at a mineral prospect that had some underground mine
workings that had been submitted to Utah in the Black Canyon area
in Arizona. I got in trouble by trying to be a nice guy. The
owner of the mine had offered to pump out a winze--a winze is an
interior shaft that was full of water.
Lowell: It was full of water. He had an electric sump pump that weighed a
hundred pounds or more and was attached to a steel cable. There
was a staging in the shaft (staging is like a timber platform),
and he couldn t make the sump pump work. It wouldn t raise the
water, and he was trying to lift it up and down to get the pumping
process started. I went by maybe ten feet above him in the mine
drift and asked him what he was doing, and he said the pump was
too heavy to lift and told me what he was trying to do.
So I climbed down onto the staging and got ahold of the
cable with him, and we pulled together. Unbeknownst to me, the
staging hadn t been put in very well, and when we pulled hard on
the cable, everything came loose, and the mine owner and I and a
bunch of heavy pieces of timber all fell down the shaft together.
We fell about thirty-five feet to the water and hit the
water and then went a long ways below the surface. I had a little
ordinary flashlight that I happened to have in my hand, which
continued burning underwater. I looked around, and I saw this
other fellow floating in the water, and I grabbed ahold of him and
swam back up to the surface. He was unconscious, and I draped him
over one of the timbers. The whole shaft was full of pieces of
timber, some of which were ten inches square, big pieces of wood.
Then we had to hang onto the timber. Don Hansen had
expected to meet me, and when I didn t show up, he came looking.
I was able to yell to him as he went by, and he found a ladder and
got it hung in the shaft, which was no mean trick. In the
129
meantime, I noticed that my shirt was bloody, and I found out that
I had broken my elbow, when I either hit the side of the shaft or
a piece of timber had hit me on the way down or after I was in the
water.
So it turned out to be quite a hectic experience.
Swent : I was just thinking, too, you probably had a battery around your
belt and--
Lowell: No, it was a very casual trip.
Swent: I would think it would be awfully hard to get back up to the
surface of the water if you had mine boots and--
Lowell: That s right.
Swent: --battery and all those things.
Lowell: I hadn t thought about that, but that s exactly right. It was a
chip fracture of this bone [demonstrating]. Broken, and it was
painful, but not particularly debilitating. I was able to drive
home after getting out of the shaft.
Swent: Well, that s a scary one!
Lowell: Yes! It s a good example for why the safety rules should be
followed .
Swent : Yes.
Mules, Grizzly Bears, and Elephants
Lowell: Explorationists who work in the "bush" tell tall stories about
dangerous animals which usually cast the teller in a heroic light.
If the field work is in Latin America, the dangerous animal is
likely to be a mule, or maybe a poisonous snake. In Canada and
Alaska the animal of choice is the grizzly bear, although it s
also possible to be chased by a black bear. However, in Thailand
there are even more dramatic animals like wild elephants and king
cobras. Anyway, these are some of my bush tall stories:
!
This section was rewritten and inserted by Mr. Lowell during the
editing process.
130
I made many muleback trips into the mountains in Mexico and
the Dominican Republic and Honduras and Ecuador, and many trips in
the Andes of Peru and Chile on mules and horses. Horses are dumb
and excitable and buck you off and fall on you (I have a 14-inch
stainless steel plate attached to my right femur), but mules,
while being less inclined to buck and more intelligent, are MEAN.
They are vindictive on the basis of indignities suffered up to
years earlier, or perhaps it is some sort of ancestral
vindictiveness about being domesticated.
In the late 1960s I made a trip to Honduras to look at two
copper prospects owned by an airline company and prospector in
Tegucigalpa named Bill Lady. Bill was a very nice guy, but as I
learned, had a bad temper. He also was very proud of his bush
lore and told me about his expertise in mule handling and mule
riding. This was also bandit country and Bill carried a very
large revolver on the trip.
We went to the jumping off point for one of the prospects
and Bill rented two mules from a little ranch and we started off.
It was immediately clear that the mules were only half broken. My
mule, at one point, spun with me on a narrow trail with a cliff on
one side and I made many revolutions until I was able to jump off
on the uphill side, but I managed to ride him all day. Bill s
mule caused constant problems and finally succeeded in banging
Bill s knee very painfully on a boulder. I was fifty feet ahead
on the trail and Bill jumped off and hobbled after the mule in a
fury. He pulled out his revolver and cocked the hammer and said,
"I m going to kill you, you dirty son of a bitch." This alarmed
me, not through any benevolent desire to save the mule s life, but
because I was in the line of fire. I asked Bill to wait a minute
until I climbed a few feet up the slope, but by this time his knee
hurt a little less and he decided not to shoot.
In the early seventies I had a consulting assignment to look
at some copper prospects in the Dominican Republic in a
combination helicopter-mule expedition in the mountains. I was
dropped by the helicopter at a ranch in the jungle where some
mules had been lined up, and together with Vreeland Johnson, the
claim owner, and a Dominican arriero, we were to ride all day
visiting a prospect and would be picked up late in the day in a
clearing on the other side of the mountains where the helicopter
would land. I made several mistakes that day, and the first was
in telling the arriero that I was a good mule rider--this resulted
in my getting the worst mule who from my first move to get on went
through his bag of tricks which included biting, kicking,
spinning, and bucking. We had a who-is-in-charge tussle for the
first half hour and then settled into a clippity-clop trot on a
trail in the jungle along a river bank.
131
It was a warm morning and I began to daydream when I saw
something in the corner of my eye. When I looked to the .right
there was an attractive young Dominican woman, bare to the waist,
washing clothes on the river bank! It took a second or two to
bring this picture into proper focus, but that was plenty of time
for the mule to realize my guard was down and swerve off the trail
towards a tree with a limb about six inches higher than the
saddle.
When he broke into a run I felt the acceleration and saw the
limb and threw my legs up and lay back on the mule s rump and
slithered under the limb, but for a while couldn t get back in the
saddle and galloped by the partly clad lady rotating in horizontal
circles on the mule. I have wondered since what she thought of
the performance. I was able to get back into the saddle without
falling off and we continued clippity-clopping on.
The prospect was in a little mountain range, and in the
afternoon we were going down a steep trail when the gurapera on
the saddle broke. This is the strap on a mule saddle under the
mule s tail which keeps the saddle from slipping forward over the
mule s shoulders. This is necessary because a mule s shoulders
are narrower than a horse s. I didn t realize that the gurapera
was broken until I noticed that the mule s ears were almost in my
face. I then climbed frantically backward until I could grab the
mule s tail. The mule was unable to bite, kick, spin, or buck
because he was just as anxious to not fall off the cliff as I was.
We came to a condition of equilibrium with the mule s legs
spraddled out and me lying backwards with a death grip on the
tail. The arriero observed after this second performance, "Senor,
you are a very agile gringo!"
In the course of our adventures during the day, our package
of ham and cheese sandwiches had been totally mashed into a flat
tortilla of homogeneous ham, cheese, bread, and wax paper, and we
declined to eat it at lunch, but when we arrived at the clearing
and the helicopter had not arrived, we cut the mess up into three
pieces and ate it. About dark the machine arrived and we flew to
a small airport with a one-room terminal building. When the pilot
circled to land next to the building, Dominican soldiers ran out
of both doors waving their arms and pointing to a spot on the
airstrip. I asked the pilot what that was all about and he said,
"Oh, that area must have been mined because there is a current
threatened invasion by another Caribbean country."
Vreeland Johnson, the claim owner, was an American who owned
a Dominican flying service and had spent all of his career in the
Dominican Republic. He was killed in a helicopter crash after I
knew him. I asked Vreeland how he happened to settle in the
132
Dominican Republic. He told me that during World War II he was a
navy PBY pilot and assigned to a base in the Aleutian Islands, an
area which is said to have the worst weather in the world. He
said it was a miserable life with no feminine companionship and
nothing to do. He said they took off from the base in the middle
of blizzards and flew out over the ocean in bad weather looking
for Japanese ships and on the rare occasions when they found one,
they were shot at. On their return flights they had great
difficulty finding the base and often also landed in a blizzard.
Vreeland said a questionnaire arrived from the Navy Department and
one of the questions was, "In what capacity do you think you could
be of most value to the United States Navy?" Vreeland filled this
out: "As a military attache in a Caribbean country." The other
pilots laughed, but two months later he was transferred to Santo
Domingo and when the war was over, he stayed.
In the early 1970s I was asked to visit two porphyry copper
prospects in the Atlin district near the British Columbia-Yukon
Territory border. My son, Doug, was twelve years old and I asked
him if he would like to go since it sounded like an interesting
trip. We spent several days flying in a helicopter in the bush
and it was during the salmon run which is also when grizzly bears
congregate on salmon rivers. The first day we flew into a sport
fishing camp on the Taku River which we planned to use as a base
camp for the mineral prospect visits. We saw six grizzlies from
the air before landing. The pilot landed on an island in the
river a hundred yards from the camp instead of on the river bank.
When I asked why, he said grizzlies sometimes tear up helicopters
and the theory is that they remember being chased and when they
find their enemy on the ground, they get even.
There were no fishermen in the camp, only a guide and a
cook. The guide had had a frightening confrontation with a big
sow grizzly shortly before we landed and we heard hours of bear
stories. Doug borrowed a fishing rod and thrashed the water and
the fishing was exceptionally good. He got up to start again at
dawn while I was still mostly asleep. I heard what sounded like
pigs grunting, then a shout, and then a little later the same
sequence of sounds followed by a shot. At this I piled out of my
tent in my underwear to see what was happening. There was a
little (300-pound) dead bear at the edge of camp and the guide was
holding a 30-06 rifle and Doug was climbing down from a pine tree.
Three yearling cubs had walked into camp on the river bank, and
Doug had run up a tree, and the guide had yelled at the bears and
they ran into the bush, but they reconsidered and came back out in
their fighting stance walking on their knuckles, and the guide
shot the lead bear between the eyes and the other two ran.
1973 visit to copper prospect in northern Luzon, Philippines--Bontoc
country. Airstip is WWII Japanese fighter plane strip. From the left:
Louis Albarracin, unknown geologist, Al Faretta, and David Lowell.
** - "-, *$* * -
I"
***,-^
N
David Lowell in Atlas Carmen pit: Cebu, Philippines, 1975,
Above: David Lowell with a group of "Negritos", a small indigenous
Negroid native group at a Benguet copper prospect east of Subic Bay,
1983. This area was
covered by a 200-meter-
thick layer of volcanic
ash in the later eruption
of Mount Pinatubo.
Right: Luzon, Philippines:
Mount Pinatubo copper
prospect, 1983.
David Lowell and
Louie Albarracin.
Visit to Dizon prospect, 1978, resulting in Benguet s decision to
develop the Dizon mine. Left to right: Burl Worley, unidentified
Benguet geologists, Louis Albarracin, David Lowell, Earl McCarthy,
and Al Faretta.
David Lowell in the Dizon pit, 1982.
133
In 1982 I made two trips to Thailand to work on porphyry
copper and disseminated gold deposits near Loei. The Thai
geologist I worked with was named Wat, and when I arrived he gave
me an orientation which included how to deal with dangerous
animals which in that district included wild elephants and king
cobras. Wat said that there were three things you could do if
chased by an elephant. If you were in a flat area and there was a
nearby bamboo grove, run into it because elephants break the
bamboo shoots and the sharp broken shafts puncture their pinkies
so they don t chase geologists into bamboo thickets. If you are
in an open flat area look for a big tree too big for the elephant
to push over and run around it close to the trunk. The elephant
with his wide wheel base has to run farther out on a much longer
path length and tires out sooner than the terrified geologist. If
you are chased by an elephant on a steep hillside you must
remember that the elephant can run much faster than you uphill,
and downhill. However, with his wide wheel base he cannot run
horizontally or he would roll down the hill, so you must run along
the contour line.
King cobras, according to Wat, are encountered in tall
elephant grass and normally rise suddenly to confront you at eye
level. They can travel faster than a man and if you run will
chase and kill you, so what you do is stand perfectly still and
stare into the king cobra s eyes. After a while, according to
Wat, the cobra will get tired and drop down and slither off. I
wasn t so sure about Wat s stories, but we did once see some huge,
dinner-plate-sized tracks which made me nervously try to remember
the three sets of elephant instructions.
We ate breakfast every morning in Loei in a little "greasy
spoon" restaurant and were served by a pretty young waitress. The
last day I was in Loei the waitress and Wat had an animated
conversation and when we left I asked him what they were talking
about. Wat said that she observed that winter was coming on and
that a man would suffer from the cold at night if he didn t have a
warm female to sleep with. Wat said he told her that he thought
that he would just buy a blanket! 2
Adventures in the Philippines
Lowell: Other kind of exciting things that have happened to me: I in the
1970s did a lot of work in the Philippine Islands for Placer
2
End of inserted and rewritten section.
134
Development Company and Benguet Corporation and Atlas Consolidated
Mining Company and Lepanto. I worked for most of the large
companies working in the Philippines on porphyry copper deposits.
The law and order situation in the Philippines has never been
really very good since the Second World War. It gets worse and
better, but we had various little exciting experiences.
There was a Philippine group called the New People s Army,
which was a communist insurgent terrorist group, not as bad as
Sendero Luminoso in Peru but with some of the same kind of ideas.
I remember at one time, on a trip to look at an Atlas gold
prospect on Masbate Island the Filipinos tend to be kind of
sneaky about telling you what they think you ought to know and not
what they think you want to know. On this occasion, they took me
out in an NPA training area, where they had some kind of a truce
arrangement with the insurgents. They didn t tell me where we
were going until we were already there. We drove over a jeep
trail in the jungle for an hour or more to look at some prospects,
and then at the end of the day we drove back out.
We had come through a dip. It was a dirt road, but they put
in a cement dip to provide a crossing for a stream. There was an
open area on the other side of the dip, and on the trip out we
drove down and stopped. The driver stopped just before going into
the dip. I was sitting in the right front seat, and there were
several other geologists; it was a Toyota Land Cruiser automobile.
Nobody said anything, and nobody got out. Probably a full minute
went by. I said, "Why did we stop?" And the driver said, "Well,
somebody has put a log across the road." There was a big coconut
trunk across the road, which I hadn t noticed.
What had happened was that these communist insurgents had
put this across the road, knowing that we were there, to make us
stop. Nobody knew what the next step [chuckles] in the play was.
Finally, two of the Filipinos got out very slowly and walked very
slowly through the dip and very slowly moved the log off the road,
but there were undoubtedly some people with automatic rifles in
the tree line, watching us while this went on [chuckles]. We
never saw them, and nothing happened to us, but it was kind of a
worrisome experience.
Swent: I m sure it was.
Lowell: We drove on to the next town. We were supposed to go to the end
of the island to visit a gold mine. And the plan had been to
drive up the highway to the gold mine.
135
We had gotten a little behind in the schedule, and we got to
the town, and one of them told n:e, "We think it might be nice to
go to the mine in a banca canoe."
I said, "Why is that? Isn t there a paved road all the
way;
And they said, "Yes, but it s our policy not to drive on
that road after dark." This because of the possibility of being
attacked.
So we hired a motorized banca canoe with an outrigger kind
of typical Philippine boat and went we had to go maybe a half
mile out to sea and then up the coast. The water was fairly
rough, and we all got totally soaked. My suitcase was soaked, and
we came in at the mine camp, which was on the coast. I guess they
called ahead, and somebody was there to meet us. But it was a
little bit like the movie, "The Time Machine," where the morlocks
are out at night.
And I had other experiences. I visited
prospect in Mindanao Island several times,
killed in the camp and drill rigs burned by
one occasion, we went in by helicopter, and
he wanted to pick us up at different points
was not to return to the same place with the
that these fellows would be waiting for the
get a crack at you.
the Kingking
They had had people
the terrorists. On
the manager said that
because their policy
helicopter for fear
second opportunity to
Swent :
Lowell :
On one of the trips to Kingking, we stayed in a hotel in
Davao city. We had some of the drill core was stored in an
abandoned sawmill in the flat country. We debated whether to look
at the drill core first and then go to the prospect, or vice
versa. We went to the prospect with the intention of going to the
sawmill the second day. In the newspaper the morning of the
second day was an article that said that the insurgents had held
up a bus at the sawmill the day before, and they had marched out
I think there were something like fifty Filipinosmen, women and
children on the bus, and they had lined them all up and told them
to take off all of their clothing; they were looking for money and
watches and whatnot [chuckles]. I tried to imagine what would
have happened if we had been there and thought of myself in this
lineup of naked [chuckles] victims. I don t think anybody was
killed, but it couldn t have been a very happy experience.
No.
On another occasion, I went to the Lepanto mining camp with the
chief engineer at Lepanto, Roger Concepcion, a Filipino. Lepanto
136
Swent :
Lowell:
had a guest house which was quite nice, where I had stayed before.
Roger said, "I m not going to be able to stay with you tonight.
I m going to stay with friends." He said, "They have made up a
death list at Lepanto, and I m one of the names on the list. My
policy is to stay in a different place every night." [chuckles]
Oh , my .
I decided at about that point that life is too short to continue
doing work in the Philippines.
Hobbies: Spear Fishing and Skin Diving
Swent: Also at about this time, you were mentioning some kind of perilous
hobbies that you were taking up.
Lowell: Well, not really perilous. I guess my principal hobby most of my
life has been spear fishing and skin diving. We used to make
several trips a year to Mexico and camp on the beach in Sonora.
After we had a small plane, we would fly across the Gulf of
California to fishing hotels on the Baja California peninsula.
Swent: Did you start this after you were married, or were you doing this
as a boy?
Lowell: After I was married. We did mostly free diving with a face plate
and a snorkel and a weight belt. We sometimes did tank diving,
scuba diving. But it was difficult to have enough tanks to do
very much spear fishing with tanks, so we usually did free diving.
Most of our fishing was done at a depth of twenty or thirty or,
rarely, forty feet, which is difficult to do without a tank.
Swent: Who was doing this with you?
Lowell: Well, Wayne Wallace, who was a Kern County Land Company, later
Tenneco, geologist, often went diving with me. And Lee Vought,
who was another geologist who had a business and didn t work as a
geologist and has been a friend through most of my life. He used
to go. And Bob Thurman, the co-discoverer of the Pima Mine, went
with us a couple of times. There were sometimes other people that
went, but the hardcore group was Wayne, Lee Vought, and myself.
Swent: It wasn t a family interest?
Lowell: Yes, they were usually family trips, with kids. Usually, we were
the only ones that went diving. The kids and the wives didn t.
137
We fished primarily for groupe::. The typical size of fish that we
got were ten- to thirty-pound groupers. I on two occasions got
really large groupers, over a hundred pounds.
Swent: Ooh!
Lowell: It gets to be a real rodeo to get a fish that big up to the
surface. We had very pleasant times camping. Cooked our meals on
campfires. We used to buy Oso Negro Mexican rum and have rum and
Coca-Cola or "Cuba libres". We would sometimes catch shrimp--or
catch lobsters and cook them also. Back in those days it was
quite safe to camp out in the country in Mexico. I understand now
that it no longer is because of the law and order situation.
Owning and Piloting Airplanes for Geological Reconnaissance
Swent: You mentioned flying. Did you pilot your own plane?
Lowell: Yes. I originally acquired a Cessna 182 airplane, which 1 had
equipped with a Robertson short-field kit. With the Robertson kit
the ailerons and flaps are geared together so that it makes a flap
the whole length of the wing, which allows much slower flight. My
original airplane, which had an N number of 8949 X-ray had
oversized tires and beefed-up landing gear for landing in rough
fields. Airplane would slow down to a flying speed of twenty-five
miles an hour, quite slow for a fairly heavy airplane.
I did a lot of reconnaissance flying, sometimes piloting
myself and sometimes using a professional pilot. We flew low and
slow over the country to map geology, look for alteration zones
and--
Swent :
Lowell
Swent :
Lowell ;
I think we may have missed just a speck,
for on these flights?
What were you looking
In the aerial reconnaissance we were mapping geology from the air,
identifying rock types and sometimes structural features like
faults and folds. And also hydrothermal alteration zones, which
show up as color zones.
You were able to map and fly at the same time?
No. But there would be somebody with a map and a pencil in the
airplane. On some occasions, we would land on a dirt road or a
138
field to get out and look at the rocks, but usually it was all
done from the air.
Swent : Where did you do your flying lessons?
Lowell: Well, in Tucson. A friend of mine, who was a geophysicist whose
name was John Sumner, was a flying instructor. Taught me to fly.
John had been a Marine pilot in the Second World War and the
Korean War and had a very large number of hours as a pilot. He
had his own small plane. He and his wife were killed in a flying
accident in Mexico a few years ago. But John taught me to fly.
He had done some instructing in the Marine Corps. He said once
that he liked the Marine Corps training system. They had a
joystick instead of a wheel to control the airplane. The student
pilot was in the rear seat. He said when the student pilot did
something dumb, like I had just done, that he would instruct him
to put his head in his lap, and then he would pound on his
forehead with the other joystick [chuckles].
I had different models of airplanes at different times two
Cessna 182s and one Cessna P-210, which was a pressurized, six-
passenger, high-speed, higher-altitude plane. It would fly up to
21,000 feet. But I didn t ever have a chance to use that one very
much, and I never felt my proficiency was quite up to the
airplane .
Swent: Do you still fly?
Lowell: 1 had a 182 when we started spending most of our time in Chile.
It was hangared for a year, and then I flew it in for an annual
inspection and discovered that I was really no longer a competent
pilot. The rule of thumb in flying is that unless you fly every
couple of weeks, or at least every month, the edge goes off your
proficiency and you become dangerous to yourself and anybody else.
And so I sold my airplane at that time and haven t had one since.
I ve done some flying with taking over the controls on charter
flights since, but--
Swent: Do you have a landing strip here at the ranch?
Lowell: We had a landing strip for ten years or more. It was pretty short
and hairy. It was fourteen hundred feet long. You had to be
careful to get down in that distance. We then had a chance to
convert that mesa into an irrigated pasture.
Swent: Oh, that s the one we passed.
Lowell: Yes. So we no longer--
Swent :
139
So you take your chances on the highway instead.
Helping with Two Ore Discoveries in the Philippines
Lowell: Getting back to my work in the Philippines, I was involved in a
peripheral way in two ore discoveries in the Philippines. In
neither case was I really directly responsible for the mine. The
first was the Dizon project for Benguet Corporation. I was
working as a consultant for Benguet when the Dizon project was
submitted to Benguet. I was in the first group to visit the
property. It had already been explored briefly by the Nippon
Mining Company, who had driven a short adit and had drilled
several holes.
I felt that it looked encouraging, but the Benguet chief
geologist disagreed, and we had a debate that lasted for a week or
more about this. The Benguet management decided to take my side
of the argument, and they acquired the property and began a
drilling project and drilled out an ore body which was developed
into a large open-pit mine and was very profitable for the
company. I m sure that had this not happened exactly this way,
some other group would have eventually done the same thing at
Dizon.
Swent: How did it come about that you worked for Benguet?
Lowell: Well, my original job in the Philippines was for Marcopper, which
was a mine operated by Placer Development Company. For a period
of several years in the early 1970s, I was Placer Development s
in-house advisor on mine geology, and I worked in all of their
mines at that time, with the resident geologists, reviewing the
systems being used to collect geological information and ore-grade
information and drilling technology and so forth.
I worked at the Endako molybdenum mine in British Columbia,
and Gibraltar, and Cragmont. All three of these were in British
Columbia, Canada.
Marcopper was in the Philippines. I made many trips to
Marcopper. In the course of that work, the word got around that I
was helping Placer Development, and the managers from some of the
other companies invited me to do work on the same trip for other
mines .
Swent: Is this where you got acquainted with the Japanese?
140
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Seme of the Japanese. But I also worked as a kind of a long-term
advisor for Bethlehem Copper Company in Canada. Bethlehem was
one -third owned by the Sumitomo Company, and I met a number of
Sumitomo people at that time. I also visited Japan a couple of
times and met people there. The Japanese porphyry copper number-
one expert was a fellow named Shunsho Ishihara, who came to visit
me a couple of times in Arizona. He worked mainly for the
Japanese Geological Survey and one of the universities.
I kind of interrupted you there,
about Marcopper.
I m sorry. You were talking
At Marcopper I had a very indirect input in the discovery of the
San Antonio ore body, which was found by Geoff Loudon, who was the
resident geologist. Geoff was Australian. The thinking that
resulted in the discovery was entirely Jeff s, but I was able to
support him in getting the deposit drilled out and accepted by the
Placer management later.
Several years later, I did work on a deposit that was called
the Far Southeast deposit of Lepanto Consolidated Mining Company.
1 wasn t involved in drilling the first hole that found the ore
body, but I planned the development drilling, or a good part of
it, later.
The "Godfather" of Lepanto s Far Southeast Ore Body
Swent: When you say "planned it," what does that mean?
Lowell: It means that I selected the location of the drill holes or
participated in selecting the location of the drill holes. In
modern times, the success or failure of an exploration project is
normally whether or not holes are drilled in the right place. Ore
bodies are almost always found by drill holes, so it s very
important as to whether the right logic is used in planning.
In any case, at some point, Lepanto hired a geostatistical
firm in Vancouver--! think they were called the International
Geostatistics Limited or somethingto perform an ore-reserve
calculation on the holes that had been completed. Far Southeast
was very deep. It was a thousand meters (over three thousand
feet) minimum below the surface. Each drill hole was very
expensive. At that point, it still missed being a definitely
minable deposit.
141
I was asked to go to Vancouver. Roger Concepcion came from
the Philippines. We looked over the data, and I think the Lepanto
general manager, Art Disini, was there also. The geostatisticians
presented their data, and they said, "We have deduced that the
grade of the ore body is decreasing with depth."
Swent : Excuse me. What kind of drills were you using?
Lowell: These were diamond-drill holes.
Swent: So you were looking at core?
Lowell: At core, and assaying the cores for copper and gold and molybdenum
content. It was obvious to me that the grade was not decreasing
in depth; it was increasing.
Swent: What made it obvious to you?
Lowell: Well, it s a difference between believing the black box and
believing your brain [chuckles].
Swent: Were you looking at the actual cores?
Lowell: Well, not in Vancouver, but I had looked at the actual cores. I
would get off into a technical description of the geometry of the
ore body to really answer that question, but I was sure that the
grade was not decreasing. I was able to convince the Lepanto
manager that that was the case. This was a case in which
statistics proved something that is untrue, which I think may
happen fairly often. In any case, as a result of this meeting,
they decided to drill deeper holes, and they found a larger and
higher-grade ore body, which will definitely be mined at some time
in the future. Later, the president of Lepanto referred to me as
the "godfather of the Far Southeast ore body." Not the one that
hatched it, but the one that saved it [chuckles].
Swent: Well, that must have made you feel awfully good.
Lowell: Yes, but it s kind of ancient history at this point. So those are
three deposits that I had a minor involvement in finding.
Finding the JA Ore Body, British Columbia
Lowell: There was another one called the JA ore body in British Columbia
that was found by Bethlehem Copper Company. It s another one that
I was partly or largely responsible for finding, simply because I
142
had recommended a grid of wide-spaced drill holes in the covered
area between known ore bodies. In a simple-minded way the most
likely place to find a new ore body is directly between old ones.
The JA ore body was drilled out, and it was a relatively large ore
body, with grade similar to the Jersey pit that Bethlehem was
mining, but the development costs were higher, and the copper
price began one of its periodic decreases, and it was never
developed as a mine.
So these are all in the category of maybe I was responsible
for ore bodies A, B, and C. The human personality in mineral
exploration always rationalizes that your contribution was the
important part [chuckles], so there always are many more discover
ers than discoveries.
Ore Deposits Consultant for Codelco, 1974-1980
Lowell: Moving back to Chile again, in the period following the Allende
overthrow, which was in late 1973, the Allende government left the
large, state-owned mines, which had been earlier expropriated, in
shambles. They did a very poor job of operating the mines. The
average age of the average mine manager, I was told, was either
twenty-four or twenty-five years old. The reason was that there
was a great shortage of people who had studied mine engineering
who were also communists. They collected some of these young
political-type mine engineers and made them managers of mines like
Chuquicamata and Braden, and it didn t work.
When Pinochet took over, the mines were practically
destroyed. The Pinochet government hired a large number of
consultants and contractors to come in to put things back in
shape. There were contracting firms from half a dozen countries
at any given time, working at Chuquicamata, and a lot of different
engineering and geology consultants. 1 was the principal ore-
deposits consultant for Codelco for maybe six or eight years.
That was the period, 1974 to 1980, roughly.
But during that time, I had an opportunity to work in every
one of the Codelco mines and visit in the field almost every
copper prospect in Chile. The principal copper mining area in
Chile is the Atacama Desert in the First and Second Regions, which
is the northern part of Chile. I had begun the CAP project in
Arizona in 1973, exploring below postmineral cover. It became
obvious, visiting prospects in Chile, that Chile was a more
favorable place than Arizona for this approach to exploration.
1A3
The ideal situation for this type of exploration was a
narrow structural belt that controlled the position of the ore
bodies, which is present in northern Chile, and a ratio of about
50:50 between postmineral cover and premineral outcrop. It s
possible to map alterations and sample for the edges of
geochemical anomalies in the 50 percent of premineral outcrops and
extrapolate this into postmineral cover where there may be a
hidden ore body.
Typical drilling project in the Atacama Desert, 1990.
Tesoro District of the Atacama desert: Leonor property, 1990. From the
left: David Lowell, Ernesto Egert, Luis Rodriguiz, and Guillermo
Contreras .
144
XI THE ATACAMA PROJECT AND ESCONDIDA MINE, CHILE
Launching an Exploration Program with Utah International, 1
1978
Lowell: In 1978 I decided to just go ahead and launch a program of this
sort, and I put together a plan and budget and approached several
major North American companies, including--! think Utah was called
Utah International at that point. Bob Wheaton, who was at least
temporarily the exploration manager, I had known a long time. He
had been a classmate in college. I had proposed a budget of a
million and a half dollars a year for three years and had a series
of steps that involved reconnaissance geologic mapping and
reconnaissance geochem sampling through a 500-kilometer-, 35-
kilometer-wide block between El Salvador and the Chuquicamata
Mine.
Bob Wheaton agreed to fund it. And then, unfortunately for
me, he decided that four and a half million dollars was a pretty
large expenditure for Utah, and he came back and asked me if I
would agree to bring Getty Minerals in, who had lots of oil money
and were looking for joint venture projects. I agreed, and the
project was set up. We did reconnaissance, compilation of
mapping, and after several months I hired a Chilean chief
geologist. Through most of the project, the staff was entirely
Chilean, who were living in Chile, with the exception of Bill
Mounts, who spent a good part of his time there, and myself.
We hired several university professors in Chile to assist in
compiling the geology and do some fill-in reconnaissance mapping.
At a point early in the project, I filed mine claims over the
whole 500-kilometer-long belt. One of these claims covered most
of the Escondida ore body, as it turned out later, and another
covered about half of the Zaldivar deposit.
Alexander Wilson, interview in process 1999, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
145
The Atacama Project
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
You said you filed these claims.
Yes.
Personally?
Well, in the name of the project. I was the project manager. The
project was called the Atacama Project. We contracted a little
bit of drilling with a local drilling company that was a branch of
Boyles Brothers drilling company. It was called Boyles Geotech.
Their drilling costs were substantially higher than what we had
been getting in Arizona, so in consultation with Bill Mounts, we
did a search for a North American company that was willing to go
to Chile, and we found a company called Harris Drilling Company,
who had done a good job in projects for us in Arizona.
The Success of Harris Drilling Company
Swent: Boyles Brothers is also an American company.
Lowell: Yes, yes, it is.
Swent: So that s not in contrast-
Lowell: No.
Swent: You just wanted another American company.
Lowell: That s right, although the Boyles Geotech was pretty Chileanized
at that point. The manager of the Harris Drilling Company was
Hugh Harris, whose office is in San Diego, California. We made a
deal with him to bring the drill rig and all the supplies and
spare parts and pickups and flatbed trucks and camp, and it was
all loaded on a ship in Houston and hauled down to the port of
Antofagasta.
Swent: Did you use Utah ships for this?
Lowell: No, no, it was whoever was available. The Harris group unloaded
their drill rig and assembled it and unloaded all their supplies,
drove over a hundred kilometers out in the desert, and had
finished their first drill hole in two days after coming in sight
of Antofagasta. And they got it through Customs, which at that
146
time was relatively easy. It was the Pinochet government. The
drilling part of the project proceeded along the same lines,
through the rest of the project. We had one drill rig running
continuously almost 365 days a year. We averaged to drill
something like 800 feet per twenty- four hours through two years.
a
Lowell: We drilled a huge amount of footage in Chile. Our drilling costs
were almost exactly 50 percent of what we had gotten before. The
deal involved our paying for the mobilization, for the shipping
cost of equipment, but we were to be reimbursed for this amount
over, I believe, eight months, so after eight months it had cost
us nothing to get the new drilling company to Chile. They re
still there. They re one of the principal drilling companies
still in Chile. They now have something like eight drill rigs
operating.
Helicopter Program for Sampling Didn t Work Well
Lowell: We tried to complete a geochem survey in which there would be one
rock geochem or stream sediment geochem sample every kilometer in
east-west profiles about thirty-five kilometers long, which had a
north-south spacing which averaged maybe five kilometers between
profiles. We started off planning to do this out of helicopters.
Pancho Ortiz, who was the fellow that I hired as chief geologist,
and I tried for two or three days to do the helicopter sampling in
order to establish a protocol for the helicopter sampling, and it
became pretty obvious that it was both dangerous and expensive to
do that.
Swent : How would you do sampling from a helicopter?
Lowell: Well, you would have several samplers. If the helicopter would
carry the pilot and three samplers, the pilot would drop a sampler
and then fly a kilometer further and drop a second sampler and fly
a kilometer further and drop a third one.
Swent: And they would pick up--
Lowell: They would collect the samples. Then he would turn around and fly
back and pick up the first and the second and the third sampler,
and drop them farther along. Kind of a--
Swent :
Leapfrog?
147
Lowell: --leapfrog process.
Swent : But they were actually just manually picking up the samples.
Lowell: Yes. And this kind of utilization of helicopters is--it wasn t a
new idea. It s commonly done in various parts of the world, where
there is not good road access. But the problem that we ran into
was the first area, which was fairly representative of our whole
project, was at an elevation of about 12,000 feet, and the
performance of a helicopter gets worse and worse at altitude. The
Andes are famous for being a windy part of the world, especially
in the afternoon. The pilot was having trouble making quick
landings at each point on our traverse at that altitude, with
those wind speeds. And it began to look distinctly dicey to do
it.
After two or three days, I said, "Forget it," and we sent
the helicopter back to Santiago and did the sample collection from
jeeps or on foot. A lot of the sampling was done by driving to
one end of a thirty-five-kilometer traverse and dropping the
sampler and then driving to the other end and pick him up at the
end of the day.
Tyler Kittredge Meets the Sampling Challenge
Swent: He was walking thirty-five kilometers a day?
Lowell: Yes. That s about twenty miles. It s fairly easy walking there,
through most of the desert, but it s also pretty strenuous.
Swent: I would think so.
Lowell: We had a problemyou put your finger on an important part of the
problem, which was getting somebody physically able to do this.
It wasn t working very well, and somebody told me about an
American geologist named Tyler Kittredge, who lived in Panama, who
was a kind of a Rambo-type of fellow. He had been shot three
times in the chest in Vietnam and had then throttled the fellow
that had shot him [chuckles]. I called Tyler on the telephone and
asked him if he was interested in this job, and he said he was,
and he did all of the sampling. He actually personally collected
most of--I think it was 2,500 samples.
Swent: How could you get your drill rigs in there?
Lowell: Well, after building a road. We used a bulldozer--
148
Swent: What were these samples from?
Lowell: The samples were from whatever was present at the one-kilometer
interval. If there was a rock outcrop of--
Swent :
Oh, it wasn t drilling samples that you were collecting.
Lowell: No, no.
Swent: Oh, this was a person who was going along--
Lowell: It was surface sampling.
Swent: Grab sampling.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: All right, okay.
Lowell: So that was one of the rings of the circus, was this sampling
program. We had some land problems also, but we started out an
assembly line of drilling prospects that were represented by
geochemical anomalies and/or geological evidence of a possible
porphyry copper system.
The first prospect that we drilled was called El Tesoro. It
turned out to be a near miss. The ore body that maybe ten years
later I drilled out, called Leonor, was in our project area. A
continuing argument with Sig Meussig began at El Tesoro. Sig
didn t--Sig was a sedimentary rock geologist, a soft rock
geologist, who had never found a pound of ore. He has a Ph.D.,
but he really didn t understand very much about hard-rock geology
or ore deposit geology, but thought he did [chuckles].
Swent: He was with Getty?
Lowell: He was with Getty. He was the exploration manager for Getty. And
he couldn t understand why we were drilling at El Tesoro. There
has since been an ore body found there and a large mine is being
developed. We drilled four other prospects. The fifth one was
Escondida.
Swent: You said there were some land problems. How did you resolve them?
Lowell: Well, we had one Chilean engineer, whose name was Donaldo Rojas,
who was our land guy. His brother, whose name is Nivaldo Rojas,
was a geologist. Nivaldo was probably the best exploration
geologist that I had in Chile during this project. He since
worked for BHP and has been in charge of their work in Argentina.
149
Nivaldo--I m off on a tangent--Nivaldo was not a university
graduate. He graduated from a two-year technical school.
Swent: In Chile?
Lowell: In Copiapo, Chile. At one point, I tried to talk him into going
back to the university and offered to pay a half-time salary while
he was in the university, but he had a family and decided he
didn t want to do that, but it didn t hold him back at all. He
has done very well. And his brother also was a very competent guy
in the land work and surveying.
Each land problem is a separate problem. They most commonly
revolve around trying to negotiate option deals with landowners.
Sometimes the logistical problems of locating mining claimsthe
bulk of the work in Chile is in determining the land status. The
records in Chile are not very systematically kept, and it s
sometimes very difficult to find out who owns what property.
Swent: Are these in the region, or did you have to go to Santiago?
Lowell: Both, both. And that s part of the difficulty. I ll come back to
our biggest land problem in a minute, but we drilled four
prospects. The first one we got some suggestion of an ore body.
Swent: This is El Tesoro?
Lowell: At El Tesoro. But nothing in the second, third, and fourth
targets drilled. And the fifth was Escondida. Escondida had
been--we were the sixth company to do work at Escondida.
Escondida Mine
Swent: It already had been named?
Lowell: No, we named it, and that s part of the story. None of the
previous five companies had found anything encouraging enough to
drill a hole
world.
in, and it s now the largest copper deposit in the
Swent: [laughs] These are the stories that keep you all going, right?
Lowell: Yes. I looked at it the first time with Pancho Ortiz, who is also
a very capable, smart geologist. Pancho has a master s degree
from Stanford University and worked on, but did not complete, a
150
doctorate at Colorado School of Mines, and he has a degree from
University of Chile.
Swent: Had he looked at this before?
Lowell: No, he had never been there.
Swent: Had he been involved with Escondida?
Lowell: No. But there had been five companies there. On our first visit,
the group consisted of Nivaldo and Pancho and myself. It fit part
of the criteria for one of our projects. There was some of the
right kind of hydrothermal alteration, and there was concentric
zoning, including lead-zinc occurrences and scarn in the outer
edges of the system, and a couple of weak showings of oxide copper
in places on the surface. But the leached capping wasn t typical;
the iron oxide minerals that remain after ore has been leached at
the surface and the copper carried away, usually downwardthere" s
a whole science in interpretation of leached capping. This
leached capping didn t look very favorable, but the occasional
piece of it did look good. There was a copper geochemical anomaly
in our regional work in this place, and a molybdenum anomaly.
As a cross check, l--well, the first thing I did was collect
I think it was something like 150 leached capping samples on a
grid pattern, sampling on the surface. And the second thing was
asking Harold Courtright, who was supposed to be the world expert
on leached capping, who was a friend of mine who had previously
worked for Asarco and was then doing consulting work, to give a
second opinion on the leached capping. I asked Utah if they would
be in agreement of sending him to Chile to look at the capping,
and they said no, that they were willing to pay a couple of days
of his time to look at rock specimens but they weren t willing to
have him sent to Chile, which was--
Swent : You couldn t do this on your own, under your contract?
Lowell: At that point in the contract, no. There had been a disagreement
in the El Tesoro project, and I had bulled ahead on the rest, but
we were having louder and louder decibel arguments between myself
and Sig Meussig. The operator was Utah, but Meussig represented a
50 percent partner in the financing. This whole story is a little
bit a comedy of errors, but that was the situation with Harold
Courtright s work. 1 sent him a map and a collection of samples.
The part of the picture that he didn t understand was that
this was not a typical Southwest climate, but it was the Atacama
Desert, the driest climate in the world. There is a process that
goes on which Hans Langerfeld, a Chilean geologist working for
151
Anglo-American, named "super leaching." That is a leaching
process which is probably the result of capillary migration of
water from deep levels to the surface of the desert, where it
evaporates but it has carried salts in solution, which crystallize
when water evaporates, and the crystallization causes an
expansion. It s a diurnal variation--expansion-contraction--in
the rock.
This has the effect of plucking limonite out of the leached
capping, so instead of having all of the limonite and the right
textures, you end up with part of the limonite in a sort of a
melting of the silicate textures, in which the original pyrite
pseudomorph cube shapes become spherical, like scoria, which is a
rock that has little spherical cavities in it.
I understood something about this process but didn t
understand it very well at that time, and Harold had never seen
it. I was also more impressed by the porphyry copper zoning which
had an indirect effect on interpreting the probability of an ore
body being represented by the leached capping. There s a very
large area that represented concentric bands of rock that would
have been typical of a big porphyry copper system. He didn t
visit Escondida, and he didn t have exactly the same understanding
nor opinion of some of these other features which were an ougrowth
of the Lowell-Guilbert porphyry copper model. All he had were a
collection of 140 pieces of rock.
He wrote a report and said, "In
my opinion, this rock does
not represent secondary enrichment of chalcocite. It may
represent high-level vertical zoning over primary ore at a depth
of maybe 1,000 meters," which would have been much lower grade and
would not have been minable ore in this circumstance and which was
not what we were looking for. So this was a real setback in the
project. We did more sampling. I returned again to look at the
outcrop and decided to go ahead and drill it anyway on the
assumption that the leached capping at Escondida did represent
chalcocite.
The place where we got the leached capping specimens is not
within the current Escondida ore reserve and open pit; it s on the
edge of it. But it is underlain by what would be good copper ore
in almost anywhere in the world, in spite of that. The Colorado
Grande hill where the leached capping was exposed was held by a
Chilean lawyer whose name is Pedro Butazoni. It s an Italian
name. Pedro Butazoni is an acquaintance of mine. He was deputy
minister of economics of Chile in an earlier administration.
We approached Pedro and said, Could we make some kind of a
deal with you on your property? This property was held by an
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Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
exploration permitat that time there were four levels of
validity of claims. These werethis concesion de exploracion was
the least valid; and the next one was called manifestacion; and
the next one was called manifestacion constituida; and the last
one was called a mensura. The raensura is analogous in the United
States to a patented mine claim, where you own surface rights and
everything.
That means "measuring."
Yes. And it s measured because it has been measured by a perito,
who is equivalent to a U.S. mineral surveyor. He s an officer of
the government, really.
Expert .
It s a cadastral survey and done very precisely. His title to the
ground was pretty flimsy with this type of claim, but we offered
to buy it, and he said, "No, I m talking to somebody else, and
it s not for sale at this time." It turned out that the people he
was talking to were the Prussag Company, a German mining company.
Were there time limits on these
May I ask another question?
various levels of claims?
Yes.
And you were having to meet deadlines on each of them?
Well, our claims were manifestacidnes , but--
Did you have to go to the raensura stage within a certain limit of
time?
Yes, that s right. You had to go through the various steps.
Construida is a later stage than the manifestacion, and then later
you have to go to the raensura stage. But we had overlapping:
manifestaciones that overlapped his claim. I probably shouldn t
get into a long-winded discussion of Chilean mining law, but there
are various traraites, red-tape things you have to go through. If
you have a claim and somebody stakes over you and starts through
this process of going to a construida claim and publishing their
results, and if you don t follow suit, even though you have
priority in time, the other person gets title to it. I think
Chile is one of the few places where this kind of regulation is in
force, but it certainly is the case in Chile.
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Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
This is a loophole that we decided to try to follow. So we
had a late-night meeting, and we had a bottle of scotch and sat
around a table until something like one o clock in the morning.
Where was this?
In our office in Antofagasta,
to acquire this prospect.
Who is "we"?
Trying to come up with a strategy
"We" was Pancho Ortiz and Donaldo Rojas and myself. The two
people with the strongest votes in this at that point were Donaldo
and me [chuckles]. -I was responsible, and Donaldo was the guru of
Chilean mining regulations. Donaldo proposed that at that time,
if you were a company, you had to submit a survey with UTM
coordinates and so forth that would clearly indicate the location
when they were published. But if you were a small miner, you
could just describe it: I see over to the northwest the Cerro
Blanco, and I m close to what they called the quebrada negra and
so on.
Filing the Claim and Mensura Survey with Unseemly Haste
Lowell: So Donaldo said that what we should do is write up a claim in the
language that a small miner would use. We talked about that, and
I said, "Why
don t we call it the San Francisco claim?" And
Donaldo said, "No, no. A small miner is more romantic than that.
He wouldn t call it San Francisco. He would call it something
like La Escondida, the hidden one." I said, "Okay, you know more
about it than I do." So that was where the name came from, even
though the claim itself didn t ever become valid.
So then we wrote up a claim notice in the name of our
janitor, who was a--
Swent: So you wrote up the claim in the name of your janitor [chuckles].
Lowell: Yes. He was a retired miner, a very nice old guy. His last name
was Torres. I think his name was something like Manuel Torres.
He said, "I, Manuel Torres,"--
Swent: He didn t know you were doing this?
154
Lowell: Yes, yes [chuckles],, He had to sign the claim. It said, "I,
Manuel Torres, miner, single man, have found a claim which I call
La Escondida, and it s in the Agusto Victoria district, and I see
in front of me generally to the south a black hill that is
sometimes called Cerro Negro, and I see to the southwest a red
hill that is sometimes called Cerro Colorado." I ve forgotten the
language of this, but it was something like that. And it was a
relatively modest-sized claim, but it was right on top of this
leached capping, and on top of Pedro Butazoni. So we filed it,
hopefullyit s kind of like putting a fishing line out. Pedro or
Pedro s man was alert and caught this and went to the next step in
his process, which saved himself from being trumped [chuckles] by
Mr. Torres s claim.
So we didn t give up. We had another conference, and either
Pancho or Donaldo came up with another strategy. This strategy
was to do this detailed--! guess it was a mensura survey. We went
out in the field and turned all the angles and taped all the
distances and had a finished claim ready to go. We published it
something like the day before Christmas, and there was something
like a ten- or fifteen- or twenty-day period to--I think we did
this on one of the claims that we had filed a year or two before,
when we staked the whole belt. It was a mensura.
We went through all these steps in rapid-fire order. We
filed the claim, got it published in a day or two in the Boletin
Minero, and by the time the New Year s holiday was over, we
already had this nailed down [chuckles]. Anyway, then Pedro
Butazoni sued Minero Utah, which was the name we were operating
under, and in his brief he said, "This work was done with unseemly
haste during the holiday season and not according to the
traditions of mining in Chile." [laughs]
Swent: Very true. [laughter]
Lowell: But he lost, but he didn t really lose because he eventually got
paid six million dollars for part of his other claim, which
covered part of the Zaldivar deposit. But anyway, that was part
of the history.
The Drilling Project: Nine Holes Showed a 250-Million-Ton Reserve
Lowell: And then the drilling project itself wasthe Zaldivar outcrop had
phyllic alteration, and the Cerro Colorado, where the leached
capping was, had phyllic alteration. We constructed a
hypothetical zoning picture since these were just little islands
155
of outcrop with gravel between, that the strongest alteration
would be between the two. It would go from phyllic to potassic,
back down to phyllic. So our first five holes were drilled in a
line across this covered area. They intersected a lot of pyrite
and copper mineralization up to a quarter--one of the holes
averaged a quarter of a percent copper, but far less than our
target ore grade.
What we didn t know was that the Zaldivar deposit was a
separate occurrence and not contiguous with Escondida. But the
sixth hole was in the Cerro Colorado area, and it intersected a
long interval of chalcocite mineralization, which the Chilean
geologist sitting on the drill rig, whose name was Jaime Orzun,
didn t recognize. He thought it was manganese. The samples that
night went down to Antofagasta, where Nivaldo Rojas happened to
be, and he wasn t directly involved in the project, but he poked
through the samples and recognized that it was a chalcocite zone.
I think we drilled nine holes, and the sixth and seventh and
the ninth all had good ore intersections. It was something like
an average of 150 meters of 1.4 percent copper average. That
wasn t good enough to be part of the final Escondida ore reserves
because it was so much better farther to the south. But at the
time, on the basis of those holes, I was able to infer an ore
reserve of 250 million tons of 1.4 percent copper which was
already a world-class copper deposit.
I was out of Chile--! had been there when the drilling
started, and I was gone when it was completed. Jim Bratt, whom
you met in California, had been hired to replace me as manager of
the project, under the pressure of Sig Meussig. I still
maintained my rights to finder s fees and so forth, but would
still have worked on the project, had not Sig Meussig s animosity
resulted in this, which was also in direct violation of my
contract with Utah and Getty.
As it happened, it was kind of bad luck for Jim Bratt
because he couldn t claim any authorship of the project because
the discovery had been made the day he was hired and before he
ever visited the project. Also, as it happened, none of the Utah
or Getty geologists or other employees had ever been to Escondida.
It was only our group that had selected the target and had done
the work. They immediately took the project away from me, and I
didn t get any chance to participate in the fun part of it, which
was getting the spectacular ore intersections. Bratt almost
immediately terminated the drilling contract with the fast, cheap
contractor and brought back the slow, expensive contractor. Such
are the ways of large companies.
156
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
The ore grade during the first couple of years of mining at
Escondida was 3 percent copper, and it s still, I think, something
like 2 percent now. It s a beautiful ore body.
You had the contract for three years,
years?
Did you stay the full three
I don t think so. I think my last work--I did some work for them
for six months after the discovery, but the total was a little
less than three years.
I shouldn t say contract, but you had laid out a three-year plan,
you said.
Yes, and they really didn t follow it after the discovery.
Neither Utah nor Getty ever found another ore body in Chile after
that and I think they would have if they had lived up to their
contract.
The Zaldivar Mine
Swent: Now, what about the Zaldivar?
Lowell: Well, that was drilled. I think of these two as being the same
target because they are nearby. Zaldivar was drilled, and the
history of that is also kind of amazing. Utah drilled several
holes on the claims that we had, and Pedro Butazoni filed another
suit against them with respect to his original claim, which
covered half of what finally became the Zaldivar ore body. By the
time the suit was settled, it had become apparent that Escondida
was a multibillion-ton ore body. The Utah managerand I think
his title was president of Minera Escondida at that pointwhen he
talked to Pedro Butazoni, Butazoni said, "Well, I ve won the suit,
but I ll give you my interest in Zaldivar for one million
dollars." The Minera Escondida manager said, "Listen, we have all
the reserves we could possibly use, and I m not interested in
buying it."
A little later, Pedro Butazoni sold his interest for six
million dollars to Pudahuel Mining Company, and then Pudahuel
Mining Company sold the same interest to a bank for (I believe)
twenty-eight million dollars, and then no, it was sold by the
bank to Outokumpu for twenty-eight million dollars. And then
Outokumpu a little later sold a half-interest in it to Placer Dome
for a hundred million dollars.
157
I was hired a number of years later by Fluor and Placer as a
geological consultant in the Zaldivar feasibility study.
Mistakes Made by Minera Utah
Lowell: By the time Escondida was developed, it became obvious that they
had a space problem and they needed this other ground for their
surface plant. They had saved a million dollars but lost probably
[chuckles] several hundred million dollars.
So anyway, there are lots of stories of this sort about many
of the old mining districts.
Swent: But you had a pretty good arrangement, I m sure.
Lowell: Well, my arrangement was a 5 percent interest in any discovery but
with a cap of $3.75 million per discovery. Minera Utah and later
Minera Escondida were afraid of making an investment in Chile.
Escondida was the first big mine development after the Allende
period. They made a policy decision that they were going to hold
out for project finance; in other words, get financial groups to
put up 100 percent of the investment and they wouldn t risk
anything in development.
That was a mistake. It was a large mistake which probably
cost on the order of billions of dollars in the long run. They
did multiple feasibility studies in order to justify sitting on
this large natural resource. They did a total of twelve
feasibility studies before they finally lined up--it was then Rio
Tinto Zinc and a group of Japanese companies in a consortium and
the World Bank put in a little bit of money, so as to get 100
percent of the finance. They gained in the area of finance, but
they lost several ways. The biggest one was they lost in time.
The net present value of a project depends on when the annuity
from the project starts to flow, and in the case of Escondida they
lost at least five years of time. If you calculate the effect on
the present value of putting the production off for five years
with Escondida, it s a huge amount of money.
They also lost 35 percent of the ownership by getting
partners in to put up part of the finance money. So that was also
part of the comedy of errors.
Swent: Did you get credit for two discoveries then?
158
Lowell: Well, that was the next part. I got credit for one-and-a-fraction
discoveries. The president of Minera Escondida said, "We ve got
so much ore at Escondida that this other one will never be mined,"
so we compromised on a partial payment.
Swent: For Zaldivar?
Lowell: Yes. And if I had been a little smarter, I would not have done
that. But the other hindsight idea I had was that when we were
negotiating the original deal, I asked for 5 percent carried
interest, and they agreed to it but with this cap on the value of
it. The cap was $3.75 million per discovery. But I m quite sure
that they would have agreed to 3 percent without a cap [chuckles].
If I had done that, the difference would have been tens or
hundreds of millions of dollars [laughs]. But I was happy to get
what I got.
Swent: Hindsight is always clearer, isn t it? Sometimes it doesn t make
you feel a lot better. But that was a great success story anyway.
You don t want to name the president of Utah? Was it Keith
Wallace?
Lowell: No, it wasn t the president of Utah. It was the president of
Minera Escondida, and his name was Bob Hickman.
Swent: Oh, yes. Anyone who wanted to look it up could find out the name.
Lowell: Yes. He did a lot of things well, but he didn t in that case.
Swent: He didn t have a crystal ball.
Lowell: Let s see. It s A: 10. I m willing to go through the rest of--
Swent: It s fine with me if you re able to.
Lowell: Okay.
Swent: Is your throat getting dry? Do you want a glass of water or
something?
Lowell: I might get one.
[tape interruption]
159
Another Example of "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish"
Swent: We re continuing with Escondida now after a little break.
Lowell: Well, another little criticism viewed from the outside: the
original Escondida mill, concentrator, was 40,000 tons a day. The
ore body is the largest copper deposit in the world. I asked the
Escondida chief engineer how they had hit on a 40,000-ton
operation. It seemed to me they might very well have started with
100,000 or 200,000. He said, "Well, it was perfectly logical. We
were operating in the Island Copper deposit on Vancouver Island at
a 40,000-ton rate, and we had the plans for the mill all ready in
the file." [chuckles] This is for a development that cost a
billion dollars or so, and the plans might have cost a million
dollars. [laughter]
Swent: And you actually heard this yourself?
Lowell: Yes, I was told that.
Swent: It wasn t just hearsay?
Lowell: No, I was told that by the Escondida chief engineer. I think
that s a beautiful example of penny wise, pound foolish.
Just a side comment about controversy in successful
exploration projects: I ve been involved in somewhere upwards of
nine discoveries, and in almost every case there has been a
controversy about who gets credit that has ranged from a mild
argument to a very acrimonious argument. In the majority of these
discoveries and also others that I know something about but was
not involved in, there also is some kind of litigation about
ownership. It s my feeling that it s kind of the syndrome of the
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that when something of great value,
either from a money or fame or status standpoint, shows up,
people s normal ethics disappear, and they scrap like dogs over a
bone.
Swent: What aboutbecause I have heard it said that there was a
controversy between you and Courtright over the interpretation of
this, and I know that you wrote a paper praising Courtright s
work. Was that before or after this?
Lowell: It was after the Escondida project. I was one of Courtright s
many admirers. I think he was one of the best exploration
geologists of his generation. The basis of that controversy was--
I reviewed previously. It was whether Harold Courtright s
negative report was the basis for drilling. It is absolutely
160
certain that it was not the basis for drilling. In fact, if we
had believed the conclusions in his report, we would not have
drilled. But I really don t want to get into that in this oral
history.
Swent: Okay. What about your relationships with Sig Meussig?
Lowell: Well, I have no respect whatsoever for Sig Meussig. I think he is
definitely not a friend of mine and never has been.
Swent: Has he stayed with Getty?
Lowell: Yes, until Getty folded up. And had Sig done a better job as
manager of their mining division, it might still be in existence.
Bob Wheaton, who was his counterpart as exploration manager
and later vice president and development manager for Utah
International--! believe Bob has passed away, but I had a lot of
respect for him.
Swent: These personality things do enter in, don t they?
Lowell: Well, they do, personality or character.
Swent: You can t help it.
161
XII SAN CRISTOBAL AND LEONOR MINES, CHILE
Compania Minera del Inca
Lowell: The next ore body on my list is called San Cristobal. That s a
gold deposit in northern Chile between towns of Antofagasta and
Calama. San Cristobal was found by a small company that I was a
partner in. The company was called Minera del Inca. It was
formed as a kind of a lark at a cocktail party in Santiago. Two
people that I was acquainted with were at the party. One, who was
kind of the principal force in Minera del Inca, was a lady whose
name is Julia Aspillaga.
Swent : That was the question I was going to ask: if it was Julia or
Julio. I thought it was Julia. That s usually a woman s name,
and it was a woman. Okay!
Lowell: She is still in Santiago. Julia is an unusual person. I think of
her as a small steam roller who is a very effective executive who
gets amazing things done by a combination of charm and force of
personality. Over the years she has worked herself into an
important position in the Chilean mining industry as an associate
in the small miners association and an associate of Herman Buchi,
former Chilean Minister of Hacienda, and Minister of Economy who
now works as a consultant to several other Latin American
governments. She has represented Chile in international mining
investment meetings.
The second person at the party was Pat Burns, a Canadian
geologist, who had worked for me for a short time. At the end of
my part of the Escondida project, I had hired Pat Burns as a drill
superintendent to work with the American drillers in the Harris
drilling company. We were talking about--
Lowell: --the fact that at that timeand this was about 1983, I believe-
that there were no junior mining companies in Chile, and some
attractive opportunities. This was in the early part of the gold
boom, bulk low-grade cyanide-leach gold deposits, which were
developed extensively in Nevada and Australia and various parts of
the world. In the course of the evening, we talked about how this
might be possible in Chile, and somebody said, Well, why don t the
three of us form a company? Julia, who is a very aggressive sort
of a person, immediately hustled back to her office and in a day
or two had a specific proposal for the company.
Swent: Did she have mining interests already?
162
Lowell: Yes. She had been working for Anglo-American Company and
Bernstein and Thompson in Chile, who had been responsible for
developing severalwell, developing at least one mine at that
time, which was El Indio Mine. They had found several gold
occurrences in the Maricunga district in northern Chile. Julia is
a very intelligent person, and she knew a lot about mining finance
and accounting and Chilean mining regulations, and knew many of
the mining people in Chile.
So a day or two later, she said, "Well, I ve made some of
the preliminary arrangements for a new mining company," which was
a surprise to me [chuckles]. We looked around for somebody to put
money into it. A friend of mine, who is an entrepreneur in
Vancouver, Canada, who had various interests--he had owned the
Tonto Drilling Company and was in the soft drink business and real
estate and oil and various things. Chuck is a chartered
accountant by education.
Swent : What is his name?
Lowell: Charles Croft. We talked to him, and he agreed to put up $106,000
for a one-year budget, which is a subminimal-size exploration
budget, but--I agreed to contribute some of my time, and I worked
in the planning and evaluation and managed the work. Julia did
the office part of it and much of the negotiating, and Pat Burns
agreed to do some field work. As it worked out, he wasn t very
industrious or reliable, and he was eventually drummed out of the
partnership by the other three partners.
San Cristobal Mine
Lowell: But we looked at a number of prospects. One was a prospect which
the Anaconda Company had been looking at and had made some
trenches in, in the San Cristobal district in northern Chile.
Anaconda was in their final death rattle at that time, and this
was the last prospect that they looked at in Chile and one of the
last or could have been the last as a company, that they had
anything to do with. They didn t carry their work as far as
optioning the property. They were looking at it without any
ownership position. Had not agreed on terms and so on.
The prospect was disseminated gold in a porphyry intrusive
body. Anaconda s work was very preliminary, and they had not
delineated the surface outcrop of mineralization or done
systematic sampling or done any drilling on San Cristobal. It was
just simply an interesting outcrop. I learned a couple of years
163
after our project started that the actual identification of gold
mineralization at that site had been made by two Anaconda
geologists something like thirty years before, who were working at
the Chuquicamata Mine. One of their names was Perkins, and I
don t remember the other name. I might be able to find that in my
file.
But we learned about their having worked there, and they had
already abandoned their project at the time we looked at the
prospect. We did a minimum amount of geologic mapping and quite a
systematic job of sampling. We made more than 400 hand-dug pits
on fences of pits across the deposit and in the course of that
work found a second, parallel anomaly, which turned out after
drilling not to be ore grade. But we drilled twelve shallow,
diamond-drill holes at San Cristobal with our meager budget.
Swent : What do you call a shallow hole?
Lowell: Oh, a hundred meters deep, maximum. I think these averaged more
like eighty or ninety meters, which is equivalent to a 300-foot
deep hole. I believe that seven of the twelve holes had ore
intersections at about the same grade as we had found on the
surface. On this basis, we decided to shop this around and see if
we could find somebody that would buy the property from us. We
made a deal with another small North American mining company,
Glamis Gold, that operates a mine called the Picacho Mine near the
Arizona-California border, in California, near Yuma, Arizona.
They did a more extensive drilling project and did some test
leaching, and then Niugini Mining Company from Australia took over
their position, and also bought out the Minera del Inca ownership.
Swent: When did Bob Shoemaker come into the picture?
1
Lowell: Well, at about that time. Bob Shoemaker was a consultant--! had
worked with Bob Shoemaker in projects with Bechtel Company,
feasibility studies that I was hired to be a team member in
feasibility work as a geologist. And Bob was brought in as a
metallurgist by our group. 1 worked on a number of Bechtel
projects over several years, and I don t remember which ones I was
with Bob--
Swent: We haven t mentioned those yet, and that s one thing we do want to
bring inlater, perhaps.
See Robert Shoemaker, interview in process 1999, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley,
164
Lowell: Some of those projects were at Chuquicamata; two feasibility
studies at Chuquicamata. One at a place called Quartz Hill in
Alaska, and another was Stillwater Mine which I believe is
Montana.
Swent: And Quartz Hill was for U.S. Borax?
Lowell: For Borax, yes. But I was working for Bechtel. I ll have to
check my records. I think there were one or two other--
Swent : I think you said there were six.
Lowell: Anyway, Bob Shoemaker came down to offer a metallurgical opinion
on a couple of the prospects we were looking at, one of which was
the San Cristobal mine. Part of the work that we did was to
negotiate property deals. There were two owners on parts of the
San Cristobal ore body that we outlined on the surface.
Chile has a different attitude towards debts and bad checks
than the United States. They had things analogous to debtor s
prison. If you don t pay your debts, carabineros come and collect
you and put you in jail until some family member or friend pays up
for you. There was a local Chilean who owned one of these claims
and a key part of the property, who was in this position. They
hadn t captured him, but he was in a position where he would have
to go to jail if found because of nonpayment of mortgage payments.
And so we had to--it was kind of a cloak-and-dagger deal to
get in contact with this fellow through friends. He showed up for
a meeting in the back of a van where he couldn t be seen [laughs].
There were various clandestine arrangements to talk to him. I can
find his name also. After we made the deal, he was able to get
together enough money to become legitimate again [laughs]. He
probably ended up making more net out of San Cristobal than
Niugini Mining did.
The deposit had a mineral fabric that made it very difficult
to control the grade of the mill heads. It was relatively easy to
calculate grades from drill hole interpolation and extrapolation,
but it was much harder to maintain the necessary grade from the
pit. Nuigini had limited mining experience and was unable to cope
with this problem. This problem finally resulted in their mining
a larger tonnage but lower grade ore than had originally been
calculated in the feasibility study, and this had a serious impact
on the return from the Niugini mining operation. Niugini was a
small mining company without very much in-house mining experience.
My return from San Cristobal was something like a million-
dollar profit. The Minera del Inca operation turned out to have
165
been a somewhat chaotic experience but reasonably profitable for
me [chuckles] .
Swent : It makes chaos worthwhile, I would say.
Some Unsuccessful Exploration Projects
Lowell: At about the same time, a year or two later, I participated in a
Kennecott regional exploration project in Chile for a year or two
as a consultant and with a finder s fee arrangement. We were
unsuccessful, and I didn t collect a finder s fee. The project
was a little bit of the tail-wagging-the-dog problem. The project
was originally set up as a project based on geology largely, and
it ended up being based almost entirely on geophysical surveys and
was unsuccessful.
Shortly after that, I had another small project for Amax.
It consisted of--
Swent : Was this Amax before they merged with Cyprus?
Lowell: That s right. It was a kind of a small-scale, largely
reconnaissance project with a little bit of drilling done. We
were looking for gold deposits in the Cordillera of the coast in
western Chile. We found several apparent small deposits but
nothing large enough to be of interest to Amax.
The Leonor Claim, a Property Problem
Lowell: Following that, I did some similar work for Niugini Mining
Company. [This association came about because of my long-time
friendship with Geoff Loudon. Geoff is an Australian geologist
and in the early seventies when I was Placer Development s in-
house consultant for geology in their mining operations, I was to
some degree Geoff s supervisor and mentor since he was chief
geologist at the Marcopper mine in the Philippines. I was
impressed by Geoff because he was an independent thinker and a
confirmed maverick. He was entirely responsible for the discovery
of the large San Antonio ore body near Marcopper where he drilled
the discovery hole in violation of instructions not to drill in an
area which had been certified by Placer s exploration department
in Vancouver to contain no ore and in which they were building a
tailings pond. The tailings later had to be removed.
166
Predictably, when the discovery was made the exploration manager
came back and claimed credit.
This is much like my later experience at La Escondida with
Sig Meussig. I had some influence at that time with .Economic
Geology and arranged for Geoff to publish a paper on Marcopper and
San Antonio, but I think it caused me to lose my Placer retainer.
Geoff went on to find two more large mines for Placer in PNG
[Papua-New Guinea] and Australia and then went on his own and as
president of Niugini found the large Lihir Island gold deposit in
Papua New Guinea in a joint venture with Kennecott. He has one of
the best exploration track records in the world. In the late
1980s he asked me to put together an exploration program in Chile
and he also bought the San Cristobal deposit. Geoff is a much
better explorationist than manager and the San Cristobal mine was
not very successful.] 2
The Niugini work resulted in one ore body, which is called
Leonor, which I brought to Niugini. It s back in the El Tesoro
district, where I had long been interested in the ore
possibilities. Leonor is an exotic copper deposit, and the ore
reserve that we drilled out was roughly fifty million tons of 1.5
percent strippable oxide copper, which was leachable with good
recovery from acid leaching and solvent extraction, electro-
winning.
The problem at Leonor was a property problem. We had a
clear title in the Leonor claim, but the ore body extended to the
borders of Leonor, and the surrounding ground was held by a
Chilean captain of industry whose name is Andronico Luksic. He is
now the richest man in Chile and I am very well acquainted with
him--probably to my detriment. Soon after we began drilling at
Leonor it became pretty obvious that it was going to be an ore
body, and we started negotiations with the owner of the adjacent
ground, which at that time was not owned by Luksic, but he owned a
minority interest. It was called the Sorpresa claim, Surprise.
There s a story that I ll tell in a minute about the
relationship between Leonor and Sorpresa. Sorpresa had a
horseshoe shape around Leonor. The majority interest was held by
a lady whose name was Mrs. Camponetti, an Italian name but
longtime Chilean family. Mrs. Camponetti agreed to terms for a
sale of her property to us, and an agreement was signed by her
lawyer as her agent. The night that the agreement was signed, Mr.
Luksic paid the lawyer something like $230,000 cash and paid Mrs.
2
Bracketed section was inserted by Mr. Lowell during the editing
process .
167
Camponetti something like $800,000 cash for her interest in the
property. Mr. Luksic acquired the property, and we lost out. I
looked into the possibility of the lawyer being disbarred from
practice but was discouraged from trying to do this.
But in any case, that made mining the Leonor deposit
difficult. Mr. Luksic s company eventually entered into a
partnership with a company that inherited the Niugini property and
he now has, I believe, a 61 percent interest in the composite
mine, whose ore reserves are larger than ours were but lower grade
and less profitable. But the credit for the discovery of the
Leonor should properly largely go to one of the owners, Claudio
Segura, from whom we bought the claim, who sank a decline into the
ore body and also drilled a hole that intersected the
mineralization.
Swent : How did you come out then?
Lowell: Well, I made nothing out of Leonor [chuckles], and neither did
Niugini. Niugini at that time was a subsidiary of Battle Mountain
Gold Company. Battle Mountain Gold hired a consultant who wrote a
report, which concluded that fifty million tons of 1.5 percent
leachable copper was not economic, which was ridiculous, but it
was an excuse to not get involved in the development. Another
factor was that the stock market puts a relatively high price-to-
earnings ratio on gold mining companies and a lower ratio on
copper companies: if a gold company opens a copper mine, their
stock price drops.
Getting back to the Leonor and Sorpresa claim, Mrs.
Camponetti s fatherfather or husband; maybe it was her husband-
was a partner with another Chilean in the Leonor claim. They had
an informal arrangement that any ground that they staked in the
district would be jointly owned. But Mrs. Camponetti s husband
decided that there was nothing written, and so he staked the
horseshoe claim around Leonor, which he called the Sorpresa, or
the Surprise claim. "Surprise, I ve cheated on our agreement."
The other partner responded to this by getting a pistol and
going to see Mr. Camponetti and killing him. And so Mrs.
Camponetti became a widow and for that reason was an owner of the
ground when we were doing our exploration project.
Swent: They played rough, didn t they?
Lowell: Yes [chuckles].
Swent :
My !
168
Lowell: The contribution that I made to the Leonor deposit was in
recognizing that it was--could be a large deposit and drilling the
grid of holes that delineated this good ore reserve, and I also
had metallurgical testing done and a feasibility study which
suggested that it could be mined alone, independent of the
surrounding claim.
Shall we cut it off?
Swent: Well, I wanted to ask when you were in Chile did you ever have any
contact with Bob Haldemann?
Lowell: Yes, I did.
Swent: Because I did Bob s oral history.
3
Lowell: Well, I knew Bob. Not very well, but--
Swent: He was with Pudahuel.
Lowell: Yes. I talked to him maybe as many as five times in Chile. He
was a fellow who was very well respected in Chile and did a lot of
productive work in the country.
Swent: I didn t know whether he had been involved with you on any of
these ventures or not.
Lowell: No. I never had any kind of a joint effort with Pudahuel.
Swent: Do you think this is a good stopping point?
Lowell: I think it is.
3
See Robert M. Haldeman, "Managing Copper Mines in Chile: Braden,
Codelco, Minerec, Pudahuel; Developing Controlled Bacterial Leaching of
Copper from Sulfide Ores; 1941-1993," Regional Oral History Office, The
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1995.
David Lowell exploring a southern Peru copper prospect, 1993.
idF"J*-* <c
<
"-
t v
.*.**<** Jt V ~
if** , . .- : ** ,
David Lowell, 1994. Los Calatos prospect, southern Peru.
Chartered Peruvian Army helicopter in background.
Chartered helicopter reconnaissance which found first anomalous Pierina
samples, 1994. David Lowell, Rigoberto Soto, and Fredy Huanqui.
David Lowell and Fredy Huanqui, Pierina property, 1995,
Pierina Tunnel One, 1996. From the left: two unidentified Peruvian
samplers, Norberto Socolich, Rigoberto Soto, David Lowell, and Pat
Hillard.
Katie McLeod and David Lowell at Pierina, September 1996, when the
project was transferred to Barrick.
At Pierina: David Lowell and Alan Hill, Barrick Gold Vice President of
Development, September 1996, when the property was transferred to
Barrick.
169
XIII ACUARIOS MINERA, AREQUIPA RESOURCES, AND LA PIERINA MINE,
PERU
[Interview 3: September 17, 1998] ##
Investigation of Porphyry Copper in Southern Peru, 1985
Swent : This is now Thursday, September 17th. We finished with Leonor
yesterday, and we re ready to move on.
Lowell: Well, I would like to talk for a little while about my project in
Peru. I have been, through most of my professional career, a
specialist in porphyry copper geology and porphyry copper
exploration. In Chile the principal belt of copper occurrences is
mid-Tertiary age, on the order of forty- to five-million-year-old
mineralization. Almost all of the large copper deposits--Andina,
El Teniente (which was originally called Braden) and Disputada,
Rio Blanco, and Pelambres and El Salvador, Escondida,
Chuquicamata, and the Collahuasi deposits and Quebrada Blanca--all
fall in a narrow belt, which is pretty obviously related to a
continental-scale structure.
Swent :
Lowell :
From an exploration standpoint, this is an enormous
advantage, and the discovery of the Escondida deposit was based on
the assumption that new deposits, new, very large deposits, would
fall in this same belt, which could be interpolated between known
occurrences. The belt may or may not extend all the way to the
Peruvian border to the north, but it appears that this may be the
case, perhaps with an offset, in-echelon belt that includes
deposits like Cerro Colorado and the Mocha deposit.
Are those in Peru, Cerro Colorado and Mocha?
No, those are in northern Chile, in the First Region of northern
Chile. We have worked on a couple of other prospects that could
be large copper deposits north of the Mocha deposit. When you get
to the border of Chile and Peru, the continental margin abruptly
170
swings from basically north-south to a northwesterly direction.
The porphyry copper belt in Chile parallels the continental
margin, and the southern Peru copper belt also parallels the new
alignment of the continental margin. For my type of exploration,
this is another obvious target, looking for new deposits within
the narrow belt in Peru.
This belt is marked by the Incapuquio Fault on the northwest
side and the Incahuasi Fault on the northeast side. There are
four known large deposits there: Toquepala, Quellaveco, Cuajone,
and Cerro Verde. This occurred to me in my first reconnaissance
trip in 1969 over the belt and had stuck in the back of my mind
ever since. In 1985 I returned on a little reconnaissance trip to
southern Peru and determined at that time that it looked pretty
hopeless from the political/foreign-investment viewpoint to invest
any time or money in Peru. This was during the Alan Garcia period
in Peru.
Visa and Permit Considerations in Chile and Peru
Swent: Let me ask: Did you have to get a special sort of permit to go to
these places? Could you do these sorts of things on a tourist
visa?
Lowell: Yes, yes. I never had any problems in Peru or Chile with
immigration visas. Mexico used to be much stricter and threatened
draconian penalties for visa violations.
Swent: You had done all this just on the tourist visa?
Lowell: Yes, much of the time.
Swent: Even when you were living there?
Lowell: Well, when 1 was living in Chile, after a couple of years my
Chilean lawyer started hounding me to get a different kind of
visa, and I finally did. I obtained an immigration visa, as a
temporary resident in Chile. I would have been able to convert
the temporary resident visa into a permanent resident visa after
five years, even get a Chilean passport, which I thought some
about doing but never did.
In Peru I never obtained anything other than a tourist visa,
which had a block to mark whether you were there for business or
pleasure, and I sometimes filled in one box and sometimes the
other, or both, in Peru. But in 1985 I did a several-day
171
reconnaissance and library research in Peru, feeling the
temperature of the water. Later I had--
Library Mining Research in Peru
Swent: What sort of library research did you do in Peru?
Lowell: Well, the Peru mining literature is surprisingly good. They have
published bulletins on quadrangles that cover most of the part of
Peru that s interesting from an exploration standpoint, and there
had been various congresses, mining congresses, with a number of
published mining geology articles, and there is quite a bit to
look at. They had, in about 1989 or 90, had published a
metallogenic map of Peru, which is probably one of the best in the
world. There is no similar map I m familiar with in the United
States, and there is not an equivalent map in Chile.
Swent: And they have a national archive or library that you go to?
Lowell: Yes, there s--I ve forgotten what the name of it is, but it s a
Department of Mines--
Swent : I see. Do they have anything equivalent to our USGS?
Lowell: Yes, they do. It s not as well financed, and the geologists are
probably not as well qualified as far as education as the USGS,
but there is a similar organisation. Also, in Chile the current
organization in Chile is called Sernaciorain, and the earlier one
was called Institute de Investigaciones Geologicas. The earlier
organization was modeled after the USGS, and I believe in most
respects was better than the later organization, but they did
quadrangle mapping and compilation of data and had an impressive
library. Two reasonably capable USGS geologists spent several
years in Chile helping get it started. The director of the
earlier organization, Carlos Ruiz, was a close personal friend of
mine. I co-authored several articles with Carlos Ruiz ten years
or more ago.
Swent: So this metallogenic map of Peru was put out by their mines
department?
Lowell: Yes, and it showed all of the principal known ore deposits and
lots of the prospects; all of the principal known prospects also
were located on the map, with a reference, and would make it
possible to, beginning with the map, to go back to the library and
get a running start on exploration in this given district.
172
Exploration in Southern Peru. Beguinning in 1991
Lowell: In 1985 I elected not to do any work in Peru, after my visit. But
a few years later I had a Peruvian geologist working for me in
Chile, whose name was Luis Montoya. Luis had worked for Asarco a
number of years in Peru and was a pretty well-trained exploration
geologist and a very intelligent fellow, but unfortunately not
very reliable or honest, as I learned later. But his family was
living in Lima, and he had lots of contacts in Peru. This was
during the Alan Garcia period and later the first years of Alberto
Fujimori s tour as president.
The Sendero Luminoso terrorism reached a peak probably
around 1988, 89 and 90 and was a real obstacle to working in
Peru. Through Luis--I used him as sort of a listening post for
the situation in Peru and also read whatever showed up in the
Chilean newspapers, which was quite a bit about the political
situation in Peru. In any case, in January 1991 I decided that it
was a strategic time to begin an exploration project which was
financed solely by myself, in Peru.
I made a trip to Peru and used Luis Montoya in the early
part of the work and set about exploring the southern Peru copper
belt. At this point, I was very much in the vanguard of foreign
exploration in Peru. I was almost the only one doing work in
Peru. Peru was in a better condition than it had been a couple of
years earlier but was still in a very chaotic condition. When we
began working, as I earlier mentioned, there was an average of a
car bomb exploding once every one to two weeks in Lima. The hotel
that I stayed in on my first trip was called the Hotel Condado,
and before I returned the second time, it had been blown up by a
car bomb, and some of the clerks killed. But it was surprising
that it was possible to continue doing business, in spite of the
political problem.
We began doing library research and aerial reconnaissance.
We chartered an airplane in the town of Arequipa, which is the
principal town in southern Peru and also the second-largest city
in Peru.
Swent: "We" is you and Luis Montoya?
Lowell: Yes. By that time, I had hired two or three other Peruvian
geologists. It was easy to get the cream of the crop in the way
of geologists at that time because there was a shortage of jobs
and the country was in a very poverty-stricken condition.
Salaries were low, and I hired everybody on the basis of salary,
which was somewhere above the going rate, plus an incentive
173
discovery bonus, a finder s fee type of arrangement, which
appealed greatly to some of the Peruvians.
But Peru had been a socialistic country for the past twenty
years, and many of the peoplemany of the professionalsreally
had a kind of a dim view, a dim understanding of capitalist
arrangements- -f inder 1
s fees and shares and options and all that
sort of thing. But we began work in southern Peru, and we
identified a number of prospects.
Swent: How did you do this? Did you fly over first?
Lowell: Fly over first, and investigated the literature. Some of these
were referred to in earlier reports. The geologists that I hired
were a pipeline into scuttlebutt in the industry. We looked at
and sampled and did aerial reconnaissance on a large number of
prospects in the first year. We began a regional geochemical
prospecting program in which teams collected wide-spaced rock,
geochem samples and stream sediment samples--
Swent: It s awfully tough country to get around in.
Lowell: Yes. There s lots of long hikes by foot. This was in the north
end of the Atacama Desert, and in some areas there were horses and
mules available but usually not because there wasn t enough
vegetation and water to use horses.
Swent: Could you use jeeps?
Lowell: Well, in Chile most of the area is accessible to four-wheel-drive
vehicles. In southern Peru most of the area is not accessible,
for two reasons: One is that the terrain changes and it s more
rocky, dissected by large quebradas, steep canyons. And the other
reason is that Chile is a more developed country, higher standard
of living, more advanced government; and the result of this is
more road construction by the government, or private individuals.
But it was kind of catch-as-catch-can as far as access goes.
The availability of aircraft and particularly helicopters is
also poor in Peru. We used helicopters a number of times, and it
was pretty obvious each time that you were sort of risking your
life to ride in the helicopters. Most of our helicopter
chartering was from the Peruvian air force, and the maintenance of
the helicopters was poor. The capability of the pilots was
uncertain but also questionable.
Later, a British company called Dollar Helicopters came into
Peru with three high-altitude Lama helicopters, and in the course
of a year all three crashed and the company .elected to leave Peru
174
at that point. The maintenance and pilotage was much better in
the British company s operation, but also not conducive of a great
deal of confidence.
Los Pinos Prospect
Lowell: In the course of the first year, we did a pretty thorough
reconnaissance, a first-step reconnaissance of the southern Peru
copper belt and the extrapolation of the belt south to the border
of Chile and north towards Lima. We identified one prospect which
we called Los Pinos, near Canete, Peru, which we acquired in an
option agreement. We filed claims covering a large number of
porphyry-copper-style alteration zones in the southern Peru copper
belt and in the southern projection of the belt.
During this period we didn t establish an office in Peru, we
didn t have a bank account, and we didn t hire any service
employees other than field assistants for the senior geologists
who were working almost entirely in the field. I paid all the
bills in cash and using credit card and maybe on some occasions a
U.S. check.
Swent : Did you pay your geologists in dollars?
Lowell: Yes. They were paid in dollars. We accomplished a lot during
that period. A person that I became acquainted with, also at a
cocktail party in Chile, was Catherine McLeod. Catherine was a
professional mine finance person who had a commerce degree from a
university in Canadashe s a Canadianand was sent down to
Santiago to open an office for a Canadian brokerage firm who had
intended to get their foot in the door in Chilean mining industry,
acting as a broker to finance Chilean mining companies. She was
there for less than a year and resigned from the company that she
was working for.
I had known her only casually, but she had heard through the
grapevine that I had started an exploration program in Peru and
also knew that I had a good track record for finding mines. She
then pursued me into Peru to try to talk me into forming a
Canadian company. In the meantime, I had, at about the end of the
first year, I had formed a company called Acuarios Minera in Peru,
only for the purpose of holding mining property. It was a wholly-
owned c omp any .
175
Forming Acuarios Minera
Swent: Where did you get the name?
Lowell: Well, the name was picked by the agent that formed the company. I
just asked for a company to be formed. 1 think the name came from
the song, "Age of Aquarius," but I wasn t terribly happy with the
name, but it didn t really make any difference. At about that
time, we also established a very small office. No secretary, but
we opened a bank account.
Swent: Who was your partner?
Lowell: I didn t have a partner.
Swent: I see. You ve noted here that you took in a partner.
Lowell: Well, that was a little bit later. And that is a somewhat
sensitive question. I m not willing to tell you who the name of
the partner was [laughs]. I ll skip ahead a couple of steps. The
partner was a friend I had known for many years who was a mining
executive. He offered to match my investment in Peru but said he
wanted to keep his name confidential because he might be
criticized because of his company association for investing in
this project.
Lowell: This didn t worry me at the time, but it later became an issue
after the Canadian company, which was called Arequipa Resources,
was formed. One of the reporters from a Canadian scandal-sheet-
type mining newsletter, Stock Watch, made a big point of trying to
find out who the partner was, and it was never divulged. There
was nothing illegal or unethical about the arrangement. That s
the story on the partner.
Catherine McLeod and Arequipa Resources
Lowell: But going back to Catherine McLeod, she proposed that a Canadian
company be formed, and I declined at about the beginning of 1992,
but the money that I had put in and the partner later put in began
to run out later in 1992, and I agreed that a company be formed.
It was called Arequipa Resources. The structure was a private
placement by several individuals in Canada, totalling two million
dollars Canadian, was put into the new company, which would buy a
176
50 percent interest in my portfolio of properties in Peru. There
was a provision in the arrangement that, with the agreement of
both sides, a merger would be later made with Acuarios, and the
other 50 percent would go into Arequipa Resources. I didn t
personally receive any of the two million dollars; the two million
dollars Canadian, which at that time was about one and a half
million U.S., was all spent in exploration expenses in Peru. At
the time of the merger, other underwritings were done in Canada to
supply additional funds.
We, step by step, began to resemble a conventional company,
more and more, with secretaries and larger offices and accountants
and so forthand lower efficiency, I might say [laughs].
An Unknown Partner
Swent: You were able to do all of this without ever having your partner s
name made a matter of public record somewhere?
Lowell: That s right. That s exactly right.
Swent: In Peru you could form a company without registering the names of
the partners?
Lowell: The company was formed in my name.
Swent: You couldn t do that here, could you?
Lowell: Well, it would probably be possible here, also, to have an
informal verbal agreement. I don t know that much about U.S.
corporate law, but I think that s correct. But this arrangement
was unbelievably casual. The money was delivered to me, with no
written agreement of any sort. I spent it, and my partner had
confidence in my honesty. It turned out very well for him. He
ended up with a profit of several tens of millions of dollars.
That s the story of the unknown partner.
Swent: Well, if there s trust you can do a lot of things, can t you?
Lowell: That s right. In the second year, in a continuation of the
reconnaissance and the geochem work and the ground geologic
mapping, our sequence of steps was to identify a prospect from
library research or, more commonly, from aerial reconnaissance
work, and file a claim covering it, and then do the ground
reconnaissance and geochem sampling. We had planned to follow up
177
with test drilling, and we did some of that, but most of it was
done by major companies later, on a farmout basis.
Los Calatos Deposit
Lowell: About a year after beginning the project, we were flying between
known targets south of Arequipa and north of the Cuajone mine,
southeast of Moquehua, Peru, and I noticed a concentric color
anomaly out the window of the airplane. This was not a unique
event because we had found by then twenty or more. We spotted the
anomaly. The aircraft was equipped with a GPS [Global Positioning
System] instrument, and we had an arrangement for finding GPS
coordinates on the map by programming them into the aircraft GPS
instrument, and when we found something of interest we would ask
the pilot to punch it into the machine, and then we would later
pick up these coordinates from the aircraft s instrument, and
that s what we did on this occasion.
This prospect turned out to be a deposit which we named Los
Calatos from a geographical name on the map. This means the bald
ones. It s in very much a desert environment, with almost no
vegetation. A few cacti. And in a very inaccessible place. It
required a full day s walk to get to Los Calatos in the beginning.
This later turned out to be a copper deposit which probably
contains on the order of fifty million tons of one percent copper
in a sooty chalcocite-style mineralization, which is leachable,
which would result in a smaller capital investment because it s a
less complicated concentrating plant.
We did a detailed geochem survey on Los Calatos, and we
later negotiated a joint venture agreement with Phelps Dodge
Corporation to explore Los Calatos. Phelps Dodge did a lot of
geophysical work at Los Calatos, relatively little geochemical
work or surface geological work, which were the two techniques
that I have emphasized in my porphyry copper exploration. In the
middle of the Phelps Dodge work--
Swent: Who were you working with at Phelps Dodge?
Lowell: A fellow whose name was Jorge Benavides. Jorge is a nephew of
Alberto Benavides, who is sort of the dean emeritus of Peruvian
mining. Alberto Benavides is a fairly good friend of mine. He
has a degree, either a master s or doctorate, from Harvard
University and was at one time the chief geologist at Cerro de
Pasco Corporation, a very intelligent, capable guy. He s
178
president of Buenaventura Mining Company, which is, I believe, the
largest mostly-Peruvian-owned mining company in Peru.
His nephew is also a very well-educated fellow and was
picked as Peru manager by Phelps Dodge Corporation. But in the
middle of the Phelps Dodge project at Los Calatos, a scheduled
flight, something like a 727 airplane, crashed at Arequipa and
everyone was killed, including the manager of the Calatos project
and either one or two of the geologists working on it. This
stopped the project for a month or more and also sort of
permanently interrupted the momentum of the project.
The result was that the exploration really wasn t properly
completed. There were only two drill holes drilled in the ore
body itself. Most of the drilling was in IP [induced
polarization] anomalies that had been found by the geophysicists
and which turned out not to be related to copper ore.
But in about the middle of 1993 there began a flood of
foreign companies coming into Peru, and most of the southern Peru
copper belt was blanket-staked by various of these big companies.
It pretty much shut down our exploration, our regional exploration
in the southern part of the country.
Swent: Why was that?
Lowell: Our work was based on looking for alteration zones and then
acquiring them by staking. After everything was staked, we
couldn t continue with this strategy. We weren t sufficiently
well financed to enter into a lot of option agreements in which
substantial cash payments had to be made. But in the course of
our work, we had begun to appreciate the fact that there might be
a regional structure analogous to the Falla Este [East Fault] in
Chile, with an extension on the order of a thousand or more
kilometers of strike length.
It was represented in the south of Peru by the southern Peru
copper belt and in the north of Peru by the recently-discovered
Yanacocha gold deposit of Newmont, and other deposits that formed
a northwesterly-trending gold belt near Cajamarca, Peru. These
included deposits like Maquimaqui and Taltahuantay and the
Michiquialli porphyry copper deposit, originally owned by Asarco,
and other deposits.
179
Research and Reconnaissance for Gold in Northern Peru
Lowell: But between this belt of known deposits and at the copper deposits
in the south of Peru was a long gap. I began another library
research and reconnaissance project to define a gold belt in
northern Peru. We identified all the gold deposits in Peru on
maps and noted the concentration of belts in a band south of
Cajamarca and then did more or less the same sort of exercise that
we had done in copper reconnaissance, which was doing a land-
status investigation to determine areas open for location and the
owners of ground that was held, and compiled the existing geologic
reports on deposits, and compiled geology from various maps and
followed this up with some aerial reconnaissance, but the aerial
reconnaissance was not as effective in northern Peru because you
go from the Atacama Desert to sort of a rain forest with lots of
vegetation and soil, which is not favorable for identifying the
types of features we were looking for.
Swent : Were you getting over onto the east side of the Andes then?
Lowell: No, on the west side. We had also shifted gears from being
porphyry copper geologists to being epithermal gold geologists,
sort of bulk, low-grade gold occurrences that are common in Nevada
and to some extent California and/or show up in various parts of
the world. The Yanacocha deposit was one of these, as was
Tantahuatay and Maquimaqui. I was the only one in the group who
had any experience with epithermal gold deposits.
Our attention became concentrated in a segment, and my
recollection is a little hazy as to how long the segment was, but
something on the order of one hundred to one hundred and fifty
kilometers in length, south of Cajamarca. We looked at lots of
gold prospects, and we did detailed work on some of them. We had
at least one drilling project.
Countering Terrorism
Lowell: The security problem becameeven though the Sendero Lurainoso by
this time was on the decline because of effective efforts of the
Fujimori government --there were still some areas in northern Peru
that were distinctly dangerous. Our policy was to talk to the
counter-terrorist people in the Peruvian army. I went to see
their counterpart in the American Embassy. We had one major in
the Peruvian army who was a kind of a contact guy that we got
information from. But I thought about accepting the offer of the
180
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
army to provide soldiers as guards in our field work, but we
decided that was not the most effective solution.
What we actually did was send somebody to a new district to
talk to the storekeepers and the mayor of the town to find out if
there was suspicious activity going on, and they always had a lot
of information. In a couple of cases, we elected not to work in a
district because of this problem. One district that we began
doing work in, the geologist came to me and said, "You know, I
really don t feel comfortable."
They were talking to the people and whatnot, and I said,
"Well, forget it. Let s go somewhere else." This happened to be
a place where a geologist working for a Canadian company, maybe
even on the same prospect, was killed just a short time
afterwards. So this was a kind of logistical problem for our
project .
We moved into a district between Huaraz and Caraz, which is
a graben structure, a downfaulted large block bordered by
northwest-trending faults on the east side and the west side. On
the east side of thethis is called the Yungay graben, or the
Callejon de Huaylas Valley--on the east side of the valley is the
Cordillera Blanca, in which is the highest topographic point in
Peru, which is called Huascaran. There also are a string of
glaciers and snowfields in the Cordillera Blanca. A beautiful
area. It s very popular for international mountain climbers to
visit, to climb some of these peaks. I think Huascaran has an
elevation of something like 22,000 feet.
There was a devastating earthquake there just not too long before
that.
Well, the Yungay graben is probably named after the town, or
former town, of Yungay, which was buried by a mudflow that was
caused by an earthquake. That was--
In the eighties, wasn t it?
In the early eighties, or 70-something. This townthere s still
a church steeple and some palm trees projecting out of the mud.
Twenty thousand people were killed. The west side of the graben
is another mountain range called the Cordillera Negra. The
Cordillera Blanca is a white-looking mountain range, and the
Cordillera Negra is a black-looking mountain range.
One of the geologists that worked for me, whose name is
Fredy Huanqui--all of the geologists were Peruvians up to this
point and he had worked for Centromin, which is a Peruvian
181
government corporation which was formed to take over the
nationalized Cerro de Pasco properties. He had done work in this
district for Centromin, and he pointed out hydrothermal alteration
zones which occurred in both the Cordillera Blanca and the
Cordillera Negra sides of the valley. The district fit kind of
precisely my preconceived model for exploring the gold belt.
Swent : Is it at all similar to your copper model?
Lowell: No, not very similar. Really quite different. The gold deposits
are low-temperature formation and formed nearer the surface at the
time of the mineralization and have a different, kind of a totally
different mineral assemblage. The exploration techniques are
different. I had already had some experience in other countries
with this type of exploration, so it was not a totally new
problem.
[I had previously worked on epithermal gold deposits in
Nevada, California, Malaysia, Philippines, Ecuador, and Chile, but
never for more than a few days at a time, and never in depth as in
my porphyry copper self-education when I made an effort to
understand the theoretical basis. Epithermal gold-silver deposits
are typically an order of magnitude smaller in area than porphyry
coppers and are much less homogeneous and more erratic and less
predictable than porphyries. There is some peripheral alteration
zoning consisting of quartz, allunite, clay, disseminated pyrite,
chlorite, et cetera, but it is not as homogeneous and predictable
and reliable as the porphyry alteration zones which John Guilbert
and I documented and quantified. Epithermal deposits are usually
flat-tabular deposits which are found at the surface or at
relatively shallow depth. Porphyry deposits, on the other hand,
tend to be vertical cylinder-like in shape, sometimes with a
vertical dimension of as much as 20,000 feet. We use geologic
mapping and broad- scale geochemical surveys and grid drilling to
find porphyries. Our competitors use geophysical surveys and
remote sensing which are stylish, but almost always unsuccessful.
Epithermal gold exploration uses geophysics somewhat more
successfully but relies mostly on close-spaced geochemical
sampling and recognition of silicate alteration assemblages. Luck
and persistence are the most important techniques together with
many, many drill holes.]
1
This paragraph was inserted by Mr. Lowell during the editing process.
182
Paron Gold Deposit
Lowell: The first deposit that we visited in the Caraz-Huaraz district was
called Paron. We did some sampling and determined that there was
at least a limited amount of epithermal (epithermal means low-
temperature) micron-gold-type mineralization. We eventually
negotiated a tough option deal with the owner. The business
relation with the owner was not a very happy one. We found that
he had been untruthful in what he had told us.
Swent: He was a Peruvian?
Lowell: He was a Peruvian. This was about the point where it also became
evident that Luis Montoya had been working both sides of the
street and making personal deals with property owners, including
the Paron owner, so I had to let him go. But this didn t
interfere very much with the project. We continued to operate
efficiently; in fact, more efficiently. But the significance of
the presence of a number of elongated hydrothermal alteration
zones parallel with the regional structure, together with the
known occurrence in at least one spot of epithermal gold
mineralization (at Paron), was really very exciting at that point.
This was the first time that epithermal gold mineralization had
been recognized in the district.
We had heard that a couple of major foreign companies had
recently visited this district, which provided a time urgency in
the availability of property, so on the spur of the moment--
Swent : You were talking about Paron and you were saying that other
companies were coming in, so on the spur of the moment you--
Lowell: I decided to do extensive claim staking in the district. We filed
claims on all of the known alteration zones. All of the known
gold mineralization was on the east side of the graben, in the
Cordillera Blanca, but from a genetic standpoint, the west side
contained a number of mineral occurrences and also looked
permissive for the occurrence of epithermal gold deposits, so I
elected to file claims covering all of the alteration zones on
both sides of the graben.
Swent: Which side was Paron on?
Lowell: Paron was on the east side, in a flank of the Cordillera Blanca.
Pierina was on the west side in the Cordillera Negra.
183
Swent : Hew high was it?
Lowell: The elevation at Paron was about 14,000 feet, or 14,500.
Swent: Pretty high.
Lowell: It was about 4,000 meters.
Swent: Tough exploration up there.
Lowell: Yes. At that time, I was in my late sixties age-wise, and I found
it pretty strenuous to climb the hills at 4,000-meter elevation.
Swent: How did you get up there? There was a highway up the valley.
Lowell: Well, there was a road almost to the Paron deposit. Some of our
other prospects on the east side of the valley were only
accessible by foot or on horses.
Swent: Did you ever go to a place called Pashpap?
Lowell: Well, we flew over that.
Swent: I went to Pashpap, and that was--the last bit we did on horseback,
and I was so nervous that I got off the horse and walkedand I
had had a lot of experience with trails in Mexico, but that was
really hairy.
Lowell: It s very rough country. I looked at that. I read a report on
Pashpap and did aerial reconnaissance over the area.
Swent: That was on the west side of the graben.
Lowell: Yes. It was a molybdenum deposit in the Cordillera Negra. I ll
ask you later how you happened to be there.
Swent: Well, I wondered myself at the time [chuckles], but I know what
very precipitous country that is.
Lowell: It s difficult country logistically .
Swent: Oh, yes.
Lowell: We eventually found three occurrences of epithermal mineralization
on the slope of Cordillera Blanca in a northwest-southeast belt,
and we had a continuous line of claims about forty kilometers long
in the Cordillera Blanca belt. We did surface sampling and
mapping at Paron and later had a small drilling project with a
hand- carried diamond drill and found that the grade at depth was
184
significantly lower than at the surface and that the deposit was a
manto-type occurrence, a sub-horizontal tabular deposit and we
gave up our option. Part of the reason for not continuing was the
business difficulties we had had with the owner.
But after the large claim-staking effort, we had acquired a
total of almost twenty individual alteration zones. This work was
during 1994, and near the end of 1994 we chartered a Dollar
helicopter and took a few wide-spaced samples in every one of the
alteration zones. These were kind of calibration samples to get
an idea about the distribution of mineralization.
Swent : Where were you sending your samples?
Lowell: Well, we were having our analytical work done in Lima, in a couple
of Peruvian labs, and we sent check samples to Bonder-Clegg Lab in
Vancouver.
Swent: That took you quite a while, then, to get them back.
Lowell: No. Curiously, it was a pretty fast turnaround. We had sample
preparation done in Peru and sent samples by FedEx, pulp samples
to Bonder-Clegg, and they faxed back the results. We had a
turnaround time of something like a week or ten days.
The results of the helicopter sampling program showed a
number of anomalous samples.
Helicopter Sampling
Swent :
Lowell:
Helicopter sampling,
helicopter?
You were again dropping people from a
From a helicopter. And I did some of this myself. There were
three of us, including Rigoberto Soto and Fredy Huanqui, that
worked out of the helicopter. We got a number of anomalous
samples, and the next step was a follow-up program of ground
checking of the anomalous samples, and some of the alteration
zones were of interest because of existence of other known mineral
deposits.
One of these samplesor two of these sampleswere on a
claim that had been namedeach of these claims had a name. A
typical size of an individual claim would have been on the order
of, say, three by four kilometers or twelve square kilometers,
although they varied in size. One of these claims, which
185
contained two anomalous samples, was called Pierina. Pierina was
the name of Fredy Huanqui s daughter. Most of the claims had
girls names.
The Pierina Claim
Lowell: The two samples were anomalous in silver and zinc, neither of
which were our target metal, which was gold, but these things are
often associated with epithermal gold deposits. These samples
were north of an abandoned mine, whose name is Santo Toribio.
Santo Toribio is almost due west of the town of Huaraz, which was
a sizable community: 60,000 people.
During the next several months we didn t get back to- -we
were working in other parts of Peru and on the Paron deposit.
Another one of our properties was called California Cuatro
(California Four) claim. We didn t get back to the regional
reconnaissance. We did a bleg survey, which is a type of regional
gold stream sediment geochemistry which was developed in
Australia. And we didn t find any anomalies with that that turned
out to be significant.
Pat Hillard, Geologist
Lowell: But in the summer of 1995 I felt that our field work was not going
as fast and as systematically as I had hoped, and 1 decided to add
a gringo, a North American geologist, to the Peruvian staff. His
name is Pat Hillard. Pat is a kind of a loner type of guy who has
a large tolerance for unpleasant living conditions and mountain
climbing and so forth. He had done a lot of work in Papua New
Guinea and Spain and Patagonia in South America and is a good
exploration geologist.
When Pat arrived on our project, which was August 1995, I
asked him to push the follow-up surface work for the claims that
had been staked in alteration zones. The top of the list that I
gave Pat to work on was the Pierina samples, which I thought were
somewhat more interesting than any of the other anomalous samples.
Pierina is on the west side of the graben. Pat worked with Fredy
Huanqui. The story differs on how they actually found the first
anomalous gold samples on the Pierina claim. I m inclined to
believe Pat Hillard s story and not Fredy Huanqui s story.
186
Swent: How did they differ?
Lowell: Well, they did it by hiking and riding on horseback long distances
and collecting wide-spaced samples and looking at the rocks.
Fredy Huanqui and an Alternate Version of the Discovery
Swent: How did the stories differ?
Lowell: Well, Pat told me that he and Fredy Huanqui were together when
they took the significant samples, and Fredy Huanqui had the story
that I ve heard any number of times in exploration, which was,
"Well, I knew it was there all along, and I told Pat Hillard to go
to this spot where I knew there was a gold deposit."
The outcrop of the Pierina ore body was--I was there shortly
afterwards, and the outcrop was very interesting because it was
very nondescript looking, kind of a grey, gnarly, siliceous rock
outcrop. There wasn t a pit or an adit or a cut or evidence that
a geology hammer had ever broken a rock on the outcrop. It was a
totally virgin outcrop. The reason for this was that the size of
the gold grains was micron (one millionth of a meter) or sub-
micron size, and the gold could not have been panned by an Inca
prospector or a Spanish prospector or a Peruvian prospector, and
it had never been found.
There was an area about four hundred by six hundred meters
in size of strongly anomalous gold mineralization. The first
samplings indicated a gold grade averaging about 1.6 grams per
metric ton, which is above minimum bulk low-grade gold mining
grade, which is about one gram. But experience indicates that the
surface grade is not a reliable indication of the grade at depth
because gold can either be leached out of the surface by a solvent
which is probably humic acid, or it can be enriched at the surface
by physical concentration of gold as erosion planes down the
original deposit.
My experience in other parts of the world suggested that the
second process is more common than the first, that it s more
likely that you ll find better surface grade than what is present
at shallow depth, but it could be either way. I, by trial and
error, had determined that the best first-stage exploration
technique in the Andes is to make hand-dug pits big enough to get
below this surface effect. So I insisted that some pits be made.
This was, by this time, late in the fall. Fourteen wide-spaced
pits, about one and a half meters deep, were dug, and the samples
187
were sent out shortly before the Christmas vacation. The results
came in on December 28th, 1995, and I happened to be the only
person in our whole group that was working at that time.
Pit Samples Averaged Seven Grams of Gold
Swent: Were you in Lima?
Lowell: No, I was here in Arizona. I received the assay return by fax.
The fourteen samples averaged about seven grams of gold, or more
than four times the grade at the surface!
Swent : Oh !
Lowell: So I made a copy of the assay return and made a pencilled note on
it, and I said, "Pat, do you believe this?" Signed, Dave. Sent
it to him by fax, and he was just as surprised as I was. We both
thought that there was probably an assay error. As soon as our
fellows went back to work after New Year s Day, I sent them back
to resample the pits. The second set of assays came back the same
as the first. And then we did a detailed pitting of the outcrop
area, and 1 think we made ninety-two pits. They were made deeper,
all a minimum of two meters deep. Those came back with pretty
much the same grade. I think they averaged between six and seven
grams, and there was only one pit that was below one gram. This
is unusual style of mineralization for these disseminated deposits
because gold mineralization is usually very erratic.
Swent: At that altitude, did you get snow in the winter?
Lowell: A little snow, but not much. There was a--
Swent : You could still work in the winter.
Lowell: You could still work in the winter. The obstacle, the climatic
obstacle of working was rain, not snow. The bottom of the snow
line was somewhere around A, 500 meters, around 15,000 feet.
Swent: Above you, then.
Lowell: But from December through the middle of April is a heavy seasonal
rain season, which interferes with road building and to some
extent with diamond drilling. This all happened in January of
1995 that we really realized this was very probably a major gold
deposit. We decided that road building couldn t begin until April
or May. Because this is in an area of cheap hand labor and also
188
good mining expertise, I arranged for a small contractor in Caraz
to drive two adits, and they were called Tunnel 1 and Tunnel 2.
The contractor got a small air compressor to the site by
hiring forty Quechua Indians who towed it with ropes to the site.
The access at that time was by horseback and by foot to the site.
We began driving these two tunnels about the beginning of February
1995. The advance was good, considering the rock conditions and
the access problems. One of the tunnels eventually went in a
distance of 176 meters. We assayed the rock as the tunnels were
driven. They were both in continuous ore-grade mineralization.
Both of them averaged maybe five grams of gold or higher.
At the same time, we were putting in the pits and arranging
for road building to begin at the end of the rainy season. We got
a road completed in about late May, I believe. At that time,
drilling equipment was hard to contract in Peru. There was a
shortage of drill machines. We had one drill contractor who
performed very badly and had to be replaced with a second one, and
we eventually completed eight drill holes on wide spacing.
A Revolutionary Drilling Program on Wide Spacing
Lowell: One of the significant events in the history of the Pierina
project was we were unable to get the geologic mapping done up to
my standards for a drilling project. The mapping really had to be
done before the drill sites and the drill access roads were
completed. In about the beginning of June, I finally lost
patience with my guys that were there and laid out a pattern of
drill sites on hundred-meter grid spacing. This was 333 feet
square grid between drill sites, which was a revolutionary way to
drill epithermal gold deposits because they normally have an
erratic nature and the holes have to be closer together and based
on detailed mapping and so forth.
But I felt, based on the continuity of the mineralization
that had shown up in the surface samples and pit samples and
adits, that this was an unusual sort of deposit and that we could
go to wide spacing. This was predicated in part by limited
financing and so forth.
Swent: What was the surface terrain?
Lowell: Very steep. It was a steep slope.
Swent: So was your grid horizontal?
189
Lowell: Well, the grid was based on horizontal distances, but of course
going up hill a hundred-meter-laterally-spaced hole might be fifty
meters higher in elevation. At some point I should go back and
talk about the corporate part of Arequipa Resources, but in any
case, we were able to build these drill sites and get a total of
nine holes completed, all of which intersected ore let s see.
That s probably a mistake. I don t think all of the nine holes
intersected ore; one did not.
Lack of Geologic Mapping a Problem
Swent : Were the holes going straight down?
Lowell: They were mostly vertical holes. I think a couple of inclined
holes were in that group. In fact, maybe eight of the nine holes
had ore intercepts, and one didn t. But I m a little hazy now
about that. But the geologic mapping turned out to be a very
large obstacle in the Pierina project. There were two reasons for
it: One, it was hard to do and required some background knowledge
of epithermal geology, which the Peruvian geologists did not have,
and Pat Hillard s understanding was also not very good on this
type of epithermal gold deposit. In any case the gamble of going
to a broad-spaced grid of holes probably resulted in a huge, many
times increase in the sale price of Arequipa Resources when
Barrick made a hostile takeover a short time later. If the drill
spacing had been fifty meters, for example, in the limited time
and drilling capability which we had, we would have been able to
develop only one fourth as many tons of reserves and Barrick s
offer would have been much lower.
II
Lowell: I afterwards concluded that I had made a mistake in not moving to
Huaraz myself for several months during the drilling project, but
I thought that I would be able to do it by remote control from
Arizona.
190
Corporate Organization of Arequipa Resources
Lowell: Going back again to the corporate organization of Arequipa
Resources, in the early stages of it I had appointed a Canadian
fellow that I had known for a long time- -his name was Henry
Ewanchuk--to be president and run the office in Vancouver. Hank
in a way had the same problem that the gringo geologists had of
not really understanding how to operate in Latin America. He had
had a very successful career in exploration and mine management in
Canada.
Catherine McLeod, a Very Competent Manager
Lowell: Catherine McLeod, whose nickname is Katie, understood the problems
of Latin American operations much better, on the basis of her tour
in Chile. She was alsoCatherine s father was a miner, and she
had grown up in Canadian mining camps and listened to mine talk at
the dinner table all her life. She is a very competent mine
manager type.
And so, after the first year of the existence of Arequipa
Resources, which she had a big hand in forming, 1 asked her to
take over as president in Vancouver. And I had the title through
the whole history of it of chairman of Arequipa.
Swent : What was Ewanchuk s title?
Lowell: President also. Hank is a very competent person and had been
president of Bethlehem Gold and other Canadian companies, but he
was at a great handicap in Latin America.
The Difference Between Operating in Canada and Latin America
Swent: He was the president of Arequipa. What is the difference between
operating in Canada and Latin America? What makes such a
difference?
Lowell: Well, I could spend a couple of hours answering that question.
The legal code in Latin America is Napoleonic law which says
you re guilty until proven innocent, and it says that a verbal
agreement has no basis in law, and not even a written letter of
agreement is valid; it has to be an agreement that is rewritten
191
and recorded by a notario, who is basically an officer of the
court.
The other dimension of this is the philosophy and ethics and
customs of Latin Americans are much different than Anglo-Saxons.
Swent: Is this a fundamental difference?
Lowell: Yes, yes, I think it is a fundamental difference. This is not to
say the Americans are honest and Chileans are dishonest; you could
almost make an argument on the other side [chuckles]. But in
doing business, it s quite a different ballgame. In any case--
Swent : You could give some examples.
Lowell: Well, we at times made verbal agreements with property owners and
followed up by a letter saying, "We ll just write out these terms.
That s a $20,000 payment on signing and $50,000 at the end of a
year, and $100,000 at the end of two years." If that is what we
agreed, he said yes, so we both signed the letter. This was a
mutual agreement.
Then we would turn this over to a lawyer to write up an
agreement, and the property owner would then say, "Well, you know,
I believe that this agreement should say a $50,000 down payment,
and I believe the agreement should say a 4 percent net smelter
return royalty."
The lawyer and we would say, "Well, gosh, Pablo, you signed
this other thing."
He would say, "Yes, but I talked to my brother-in-law and he
said he didn t think that was really very fair. Take it or leave
it. I ll have to have $50,000." This, in part, is related to
Napoleonic law where to be valid it has to be written and
recorded. No baloney about, "his word is his bond."
Hank Ewanchuk was unable to understand this and said, "Well,
this guy is a goddamn crook, and I sure don t want to be any part
of dealing with him. What do I tell the shareholders?" But in
Rome, do as the Romans do. You have to understand the philosophy
of the people. Your letter of agreement is worthless.
I mentioned the story about the lawyer who took a bribe in
order to give our property to Andronico Luksic. When I talked to
the other Chilean lawyers, they said, "Boy, he s really a crook.
We ll agree to that. But there s no question of disbarring him or
having him charged with a crime." That maybe in a nutshell is--
192
And Catherine really did a marvelous job after she took
over, in various areas. The operations in Peru were entirely
under my management, but she did most of the corporate part: the
communication with shareholders and prospective shareholders, and
negotiation with underwriting companies for financing, and filing
reports with the securities commissions, and going on road shows
to visit prospective investors, and attending trade shows. She
probably talked to on the order of hundreds of financial
institutions. Our shares in Arequipa Resources were held mostly
by institutionsthings like retirement funds and banks and mutual
funds and the percent owned by individuals was relatively small.
[I remember on one occasion Katie and I were in England
together talking to several institutions, one with Harry
Oppenheimer who headed a large mining empire which included the De
Beers diamond group. We met him in his paneled office and he had
a lunch brought in, but I gave a talk about Arequipa and was too
tense to enjoy the lunch. One of his engineers had visited
Pierina and Mr. Oppenheimer offered to invest $10 million, but we
decided that it would be awkward to have a major as a relatively
small minority partner and we declined. Oppenheimer invited us to
visit the De Beers diamond display in the same building. We were
shown the diamonds by an elegant English gentleman with no sign of
security (although there must have been elaborate measures). In
the display were hundreds of millions of dollars of diamonds
including the largest in the world of some classes and colors,
mostly loose so that they could be handled. The manager passed
Katie a cupful of large cut stones and she let them dribble
through her fingers into a plate, and I watched closely to be sure
they all ended up on the plate!]
2
Katie was also very helpful in negotiating agreements, joint
venture agreements, with major companies, of which we had a total
of at least half a dozen or ten. So that s how the corporate part
worked. I attended meetings, but I really didn t throw my weight
around very much in the corporate part until really the last week
of the story, which--! 11 get there in a minute.
Informing Prospective Investors
Lowell: But our policy in regard to Pierina was that we probably would not
end up developing the mine ourselves; we would end up as a partner
in development by a major company or would sell the deposit or
2
This paragraph was inserted by Mr. Lowell during the editing process.
193
sell the company to a major company. And so, for that reason,
before we started to drill we invited everybody that was
interested to visit the prospect. There were a total of something
like forty mining companies that sent groups to look at it, and
the reason for this was that by this time it was pretty obvious
that it was going to be an important gold mine. We had good
surface information, and we had a third dimension represented by
these adits, which were going back into the mountain. It was an
ideal spot for someone to look at because they could go collect
their own samples in the pits and collect their own samples in the
adits. When we began drilling we stopped the visits to the
project because of the insider information problem.
So by the time nine holes were completed, we weren t
allowing companies to visit the drilling operation, but we were
announcing the drill results as they came in, which excited the
prospective investors, and the price of the stock went up to--it
had been about a dollar a share, and it went up to over thirty
dollars a share at the time nine holes were completed.
Swent : Which exchange was it on?
Lowell: It was on the Toronto exchange. It had originally been the
Vancouver exchange, and it was listed later on the Toronto
exchange, which is a more conservative and prestigious exchange.
At that point, with nine holes completed, we had an annual
meeting, and the share price was something like thirty-two
dollars. I gave a talk about the results of the exploration. I
had insisted that we be conservative in all of our announcements.
My talk was a fifteen-minute talk, and it was relatively
conservative. There were a number of brokers in the audience, and
I noticed that they started getting up and leaving--
Swent : Where did you give this talk?
Lowell: In Vancouver, in--I don t remember the location. It was a rented
hall somewhere. Shortly afterwards shortly being fifteen minutes
or half an hour- -Catherine told me that she had heard that our
stock had dropped from thirty-two dollars to fifteen dollars
[chuckles]. I had expected that it would go up because it was
good news, but it was good news presented in a reasonably
conservative way, and the Canadian stock fraternity assumed that
everybody was going to lie and exaggerate [laughs].
Swent: And they discounted what you were saying.
Lowell: Yes. But the other thing that happened at that point that was
even more dramatic was that part of the time I traveled with
194
Catherine on these road shows, and we went together at various
times--! believe twice to England and once to France, and we had
shareholders from institutions in both countries that owned part
of the stock. On this occasion we went to talk to a bunch of--I
remember one was the Royal Bank in Toronto, who were one of our
shareholders, and several mutual funds and brokerage houses.
These were really exhausting trips. We would have eight
meetings in one day. I think we had some meetings the day before,
and we had a breakfast meeting with one of these groups in the
Prince Edward Hotel. I think we were both staying in the Prince
Edward Hotel. We had this breakfast meeting, and before the
meeting we got a call from Bill Bigger, who was a vice president
in charge of finance for Barrick Gold Company. Barrick at that
time was the largest gold producer in North America and I think
the second or third largest in the world.
Bill Bigger asked if he could talk to us. We said, well,
our schedule is completely filled up. He said, "How about
breakfast?"
And we said, "We re having breakfast with so-and-so."
He said, "Where are you having breakfast?"
We said, "In the Prince Edward Hotel."
Swent: What city was this?
Lowell: In Toronto. He said, "Well, it won t take very long. Could we
meet you in the lobby when you come out from breakfast?"
We said, "Yes." We thought that was a little bit funny.
It was Bill Bigger and Allen Hill. Allen Hill was the vice
president in charge of development for Barrick. Bill Bigger, who
is a little bit more suave than Allen, was kind of the spokesman.
He said, "Well, could we sit down here in the lobby in a place
that s a little bit private?" We sat down, and he said, "Well, I
don t know exactly how to tell you this, but we have launched a
hostile takeover for Arequipa Resources. We have offered to buy
all the shares of Arequipa Resources for twenty-seven dollars
Canadian per share."
195
Barrick Launches a "Hostile" Takeover
Lowell: And he said, "Peter Munk wanted me"--Peter Munk was the chairman
and CEO of Barrick--"asked me to tell you that this is technically
a hostile takeover, but we actually want it to be as friendly as
possible." The success of their takeover depended on more than 50
percent of the shareholders accepting the offer. This immediately
presented a huge problem for Catherine and myself because if we
advised the shareholders to accept the offer and it turned out
that the deposit was really worth forty dollars a share instead of
twenty-seven, our shareholders could sue us for having been
incompetent.
On the other hand, if we advised the shareholders not to
accept twenty-seven dollars and that turned out to be a generous
offer and it killed the deal, then they could sue us for
incompetence in that direction [chuckles]. Since I was chairman,
for the first time I was in the hot seat for the Canadian
corporation. Bill Bigger said that Peter Munk, who was a
legendary figure, had said that he would be happy to talk to us
that morning.
We had the problem of whether to- -we had our lawyer with us
on the trip to take the lawyer along. I ve always been a little
bit suspicious of lawyers, John Lacy excepted. I said, "I don t
want a lawyer along. I want to make this an informal
conversation." So we met with Peter Munk, and he brought in Bob
Smith, who was president of Barrick at the time, and we discussed
the Barrick offer. It was a very friendly, amicable conversation.
Peter Munk said, "The thing I admire most about you is your
insisting that no lawyers be present." [laughs]
Deciding to Advise the Shareholders Not to Tender Their Shares
Swent : That was a good call.
Lowell: [chuckles] So we had a meeting of the directors, and our
directors had been almost totally inactive in the company up to
that point, although there were several people that had very
responsible mining jobs. One of them was Tony Petrina, who had
been CEO of Placer Dome Company, and Chet Idziszek was president
of a substantial Canadian company, and so on.
196
We had an immediate telephone directors meeting, and then
convened a meeting in Vancouver of everyone that could be present.
There were seven directors altogether. Both Catherine and I were
directors. We decided that we might squeeze more than twenty-
seven dollars out of Barrick, and so we advised the shareholders-
and there were newspaper articles and whatnot. A bunch of
newspaper reporters in Toronto at the time that the offer was made
talked to us. But we advised the shareholders not to accept the
twenty-seven dollars, not to tender their shares to Barrick.
Then I launched an intensive drilling campaign to try to
drill as many holes and develop as many tons of ore as possible
before the time ran out for this hostile takeover. The time was
prescribed by regulations in the Toronto Stock Exchange or the
Ontario Securities Commission. 1 believe it was something like
thirty-five days. We succeeded in completing forty holes before
the deadline and almost all intersected ore. When the deadline
neared, we had a directors meeting in Toronto.
We had hired the top merger corporate lawyer in Canada, and
I think we had three or four law firms involved by this time. I
had retained one of these expensive lawyers to represent me
personally because of this liability issue. We had a directors
meeting that lasted, oh, about four days. On one occasion we met
for fourteen hours without eating anything [chuckles]. It was
very stressful stuff.
At that point, I took over firmly as manager of the
directors activities because I had the legal liability myself.
We were getting messages as to what various friends of friends had
reported that the Barrick people were doing, and there were
various little clues as to whether they might increase their offer
or not increase it. And we were receiving counter-offers from
other major companies.
Placer Dome Nearly Gets in the Act
Swent: That s what I was going to ask. Weren t there other companies
getting in the act?
Lowell: Well, there were a total, I think, of six that had made proposals
of various sorts. The biggest perceived threat to Barrick was
Placer Dome, whose head office is in Vancouver. In the middle of
one of these sessions, our chief guru- -whose name, I believe, was
David Jackson, a lawyer in Toronto, kind of an elderly, white-
haired, overbearing [chuckles] sort of guy, but very smart--said--
197
right in the middle of a sentence he said, "I think we sliould all
go right now to Vancouver and continue the meeting there, and
Barrick will think that Placer Dome is about to close a deal with
us."
This was a little bit true, but it wasn t [ chuckles ]--
**
Lowell: We had decided on the spur of the moment to move our directors
meetings from Toronto to--we were meeting in one of the law
offices in Torontoto our little company office in Vancouver. We
checked airline schedules and rushed to our hotels and grabbed our
suitcases and checked out of the hotels and allit s a fairly
long trip to Vancouver. We flew to Vancouver and got started
again with the meeting in our office.
In the meantime, we were getting under-the-counter
communiques from the Placer Dome office. Placer Dome had called a
spur-of-the-moment meeting of directors that week because of this
Pierina deal. One of their directors had come all the way from
Australia, and some had come from the United States, and they were
having their meeting. We got under-the-counter reports from
somebody in Placer s office about who had arrived and what the
rumor was that they were doing [laughs].
David Jackson said, "I
predict that Barrick will show up
here tomorrow."
I thought, well, this is taking a lot for granted to think
that will happen. We started our meeting early in the morning.
We were really kind of frantic. We didn t know what was going to
be the best thing to do. I got a phone call at about seven
o clock in the morning, and it was a kind of a slightly garbled
voice on the call, and it said, "Hello, David? This is Bob
Smith." [president of Barrick]
I said, "Hello, Bob, where are you?"
He said, "Well, I m on our corporate jet [chuckles], and
we re going to arrive in Vancouver in forty-five minutes." They
had left in the middle of the night and had flown to Vancouver.
So then we had another meeting, and--
198
Consummating a Billion-Dollar Deal
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell
Placer had not come up with a counter-offer?
Well, they were agonizing about that.
You had not heard from them.
But we had not heard from them. Bob Smithwe had a meeting then.
I think it was in the hotel. Yes, it was in their hotel, where
they checked in. The meeting was just between Bob Smith and
Catherine and myself. We talked for a couple of hours, and he
offered to raise the offer to thirty dollars from twenty-seven.
Catherine and I had a little huddle, and I said, "Okay."
[chuckles] The thirty dollars translated into one billion dollars
Canadian, or a little over a billion dollars. Bob Smith, when we
shook hands and left, said, "Well, Catherine, thanks a million."
And she said, "No, Bob, thanks a billion." [laughs] That was
kind of the end of the Arequipa story.
You decided then to recommend it to your stockholders?
Yes, and they signed up just about 100 percent. I have later done
some consulting work for Barrick and have had two trips to Pierina
in a Barrick jet, sort of progress visits.
Excuse me. Did this force you out, then, as a stockholder, too?
Yes, yes.
There was no- -it didn t allow you to continue.
No, no. I was some kind of a director for a couple of months, but
I was forced out and have participated a little bit but in a very
minor way, in the planning of their work in Peru. 1 think they ve
done a very good job. The mine is going to go into production
very soon. The first gold will be poured in November or December
of this year (1998), which is some kind of a record for speed in a
large mine of this sort. The production costs of the gold will be
maybe the lowest of any large gold mine in the world. It s going
to cost less than fifty dollars an ounce to produce the gold. The
total reserves are about eight million ounces. Barrick calculated
that their purchase price would result in a break-even operation
at three and a half a million ounces, so it has turned out to be
very profitable for them.
Swent : And none of your stockholders came back to you with a complaint.
199
Lowell: No, nobody complained.
Swent: All happy.
Lowell: And everybody lived happily ever after [chuckles].
Swent: A win-win situation. This, of course, is why you received the
awardor one of the reasons that you received the award from the
university.
Lowell: Yes, right.
Swent: It must have been pretty exciting.
Lowell: Oh, it was very exciting, that week in Toronto that was one of
the worst weeks in my life.
Swent: I m sure.
Lowell: Continuous directors meetings.
Swent: Had Barrick been one of the companies that you would have liked to
have seen take it over?
Lowell: Yes, yes.
Swent: They had visited the property. Had you discussed this with your
directors or with Catherine which company you would like
eventually to sell to?
Lowell: No, we hadn t.
Swent: You hadn t targeted anybody.
Lowell: No. Well, we were negotiating with several companies. Each
company had a different sort of an offer. This was the only cash-
on-the-barrelhead buyout that we had considered. I had, years
before, given part of my Acuarios stock to my three children, so I
had a lawyer s advice on how this should be done.
Swent: So your participation was through Acuarios.
Lowell: It was originally through Acuarios and then through Arequipa, but
by their getting the stock early, it was very advantageous tax-
wise. They had to pay capital gains tax on the proceeds, but
otherwise we would have had to pay twice as much tax.
Swent: Why doeswell, I guess it s kind of irrelevant--! m trying to
think why Barrick did what they did. I assume it might have been
200
easier for you if they had just offered to merge or to buy the
company, instead of going through this hostile takeover.
Lowell: Yes. I think from our point of view it turned out very well. It
was great good luck. This was at a euphoric period in Canadian
mining. There were three companies that were getting lots of
publicity at that time: Pierina and Voisey Bay, which was a base
metal deposit in Newfoundland, and Bre-X--
Swent: [chuckles]
Lowell: Bre-X later turned out to be a scam. This is a little side note
in the story, but after the sale was consummated, Barrick was one
of the companies that was trying to make a deal with Bre-X on this
imaginary huge gold deposit in Indonesia. Barrick asked us to
write a letter to David Walsh, who was the president of Bre-X,
telling Mr. Walsh what a pleasant experience it has been dealing
with Barrick, to try to help Barrick in making the deal. We
passed a draft of a letter back and forth by fax, and the last
draft that I sent back to Catherine was typed out, and I wrote in
pencil down at the bottom, "P.S., Mr. Walsh, is Bre-X a scam?"
[chuckles) This was a joke between Catherine and myself, and it
was before the scandal broke on Bre-X, but I had been suspicious
from the sound of it that it might be a phony project, and I
turned out to be exactly right [chuckles].
Swent: Yes, yes.
Lowell: But it wasn t of any particular interest to me. I had never
considered buying stock, and I was never involved in it.
Swent: But had this offer not come from Barrick, you still would have
been trying to sell or make some sort of merger or deal.
Lowell: Yes. And I would probably have opted to make a deal with somebody
like Placer Dome or Newmont.
Swent: And allowed them to do the operations?
Lowell: Yes. We would probably have received stock in one of the major
companies from somebody else, or a good part of the payment would
have been in the form of stock, which also, in retrospect, would
have turned out to be unlucky for us because all the mining
company stocks have gone down since.
Swent: This way it was over and done with.
Lowell: Yes.
201
Aftermath of a Windfall Fortune
Swent: Right then. But you had to take a chance.
Lowell: I actuallywe had an option to receive part of the payment in
Barrick stock, and Barrick asked me to do that. They didn t
demand that I do it, but they said it would be helpful to them if
my particular ownership was in the form of cash plus Barrick
shares because it would help--image-wise, would be a vote of
confidence in Barrick. I did that, but I soon afterwards sold the
Barrick shares, which also turned out to be a lucky break, because
the gold stocks have gone way down, and Barrick is worth less now
than it was then.
What do you say we break for lunch? [tape interruption]
Swent: We re continuing after a little lunch break here. You ve had a
few further thoughts about Barrick.
Lowell: Well, just a little postscript to the Arequipa story. Because of
our finder s fee arrangement, the Arequipa Pierina discovery and
the sale to Barrick resulted in quite a number of millionaires in
our group. I think the total was something like seven or more
people that worked in Arequipa ended the story with a windfall
profit. One of them was Katie McLeod, the president of Arequipa
in the last stage. She is a gal now about thirty-six or thirty-
seven years old.
Swent: Oh, a young woman.
Lowell: She ended up with a big house on a golf course in Vancouver, and a
very nice husband and a Labrador retriever pup. She has become
director of a number of different Canadian companies and CEO of
one. There was an article in London Financial Post, I believe,
with the title, "Golden Girl."
Swent: Did she have the husband before she got so rich?
Lowell: No, they were friends before, but were married after the sale of
Arequipa. So that s all I have to say about the adventure in
Peru.
Swent: You got an awfully nice windfall from it, too.
Lowell: Well, I did. It actually didn t really change my standard of
living or affect my life too much, but some aspects of it have
been fun and some kind of worrisome, but it was an exciting
experience.
Edith and Dave, Atascosa Ranch, 1996,
Humberto Leal (ranch foreman) and David Lowell, Atascosa Ranch, about
1985.
Dave and Edith, Atascosa Ranch, 1983,
50th Wedding Anniversary, 1998. Top, from left: Mary, Anna, Ross,
Susie, Marcella, Bill, Roxy, Doug, and Michelle. Bottom from left:
Edith, Glenton, and Dave.
202
XIV INDEPENDENT PROJECTS, FAMILY, ATASCOSA RANCH
Strategic Alliance with Rio Tinto
Lowell: I, at the present time, have gone back to my habit of doing
independent exploration projects. A good part of my work now is
in a joint venture or strategic alliance type of joint projects
with Rio Tinto, an English company, which is the largest mining
company in the world, I guess. They own Kennecott Copper and U.S.
Borax in the U.S. and various companies in other parts of the
world. They re now a part owner in the Escondida deposit. They
have a 35 percent interest in that.
Swent : Is this how you made your contact with them?
Lowell: No. My contact with them came through people that I know who are
with Kennecott Copper or were with Kennecott Copper. The
principal one of this group is Tom Patton, who was vice president
in charge of exploration for Kennecott and later Rio Tinto s
manager in South America. I have two projects underway in which
Rio Tinto is contributing part of the financing. One is North
America, mostly in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, looking for
porphyry copper deposits; and the other one is in northern Chile
in South America, also looking for porphyry copper deposits.
Most of the people working for me in both places are long
time former employees. [Ernesto Egert is an old associate and
friend who participated with me in the projects for Kennecott,
Amax, and Niugini over a period of fourteen years. Ernesto has a
degree from the University of Chile and an M.S. from Stanford
University. He was a geologist with the Institute de
Investigaciones Geologicas and mapped several Chilean quadrangles
and also taught in the University of Chile. When he left the
Institute he worked for multinational mining companies. He is a
highly respected, very honest memeber of upper-class Chilean
society, as is his wife, Valentina, and is one of the most
203
competent exploration geologists I have worked with anywhere in
the world.
Maria Elena, Santiago office manager, has worked with me
almost as long as Ernesto and is also both an associate and a
friend. Everyone, without exception, likes Maria Elena. She is a
member of a Chilean upper-class family that was ruined by the
Allende government through expropriation of almost all of their
property. She is a very intelligent person who has taught herself
first to be a first-class secretary, and then to be an office
manager, accountant, property expert, and highly skilled computer
operator. Maria Elena is married to an attractive, successful
husband, and has three promising children.
Lucho Rodriguez is a very nice guy who has the unlikely
background of two years of theology in the university and then
served as an officer in the Chilean army. He has also worked for
me for more than ten years as a field assistant, expediter, and
drilling supervisor.
Sergio Bulganio has a two-year degree from a mining
technical school at Copiapo, Chile. He is a competent, serious,
industrious field geologist who has identified a couple of key
outcrops in our current project. He has also worked more than
five years in our group. Our project is blessed by a staff of
four who are somewhere between very competent friends and close
family members!] 1
These are projects that are sort of low-budget, low-profile,
low-technology projects of the sort I ve always done. We re
optimistic that we ll find an ore body somewhere which might turn
out to be sort of a swan song for me.
Swent: What sort of arrangement do you make with Rio Tinto?
Lowell: Well, the projects are 75 percent owned by Rio Tinto and 25
percent owned by me. During the first two years, they re
supplying most of the finance, but I m contributing part of it.
If deposits are found, they wouldif they meet their minimum size
standards, which are hugethey would put the deposits in
production, and I would be a small minority partner. If they
don t meet the standards, the hypothetical discoveries will belong
to me, and I would be free to do something else with them.
Bracketed section was inserted by Mr. Lowell during the editing
process .
204
I might talk a bit about my family and general philosophy of
life and so forth.
Exercising to Relieve Stress and Stay in Condition
Swent : Before you do that, just one little thing thatwhen I was having
lunch just now with Marcia she told me that in the winter you and
Edith and Marcia are accustomed to taking a walk after lunch to
relieve your stress. [laughter] I thought you might want to
mention how that came about. I think it s a very intelligent way
to cope with stress.
Lowell: Well, it came about probably more by accident than by shrewd
planning. But I have had an exercise program pretty continuously
for maybe the last thirty or forty years. The main reasoning in
my case is that my work is erratic. I may work in the office for
two weeks continuously and then the following day be asked to
climb a 14,000-foot-high mountain. It s a survival technique to
try to stay in at least minimally good physical condition. Marcia
is also an exercise person. I think it was she that got us
started taking a walk at lunch hour. We walk about two miles. We
have an exercise machine in the office and another one in our
house for getting a little exercise now and then.
Swent: So you didn t just jump on the fitness bandwagon recently, then.
Lowell: No, no, I ve been doing that for a long time.
Marriage and Family
Swent: That s wonderful. Well, let s hear some more about your family.
You ve mentioned their births, and that s really all that you ve
said about them.
Lowell: Well, as I mentioned before, I was married at an early age, twenty
years old, when I was about to finish my third year of college.
Swent: You had quite an elaborate wedding, I gather from the picture.
Lowell: Well, it was a big church wedding. My theory is that big weddings
are designed to preserve the marriage because the husband involved
can t face the thought of having a second one.
205
Swent: [laughter] Where were you married?
Lowell: In Tucson.
Swent: In what church?
Lowell: It was an Episcopal church. I believe the name of it--it s now
gonebut I think it was called St. Andrew s Episcopal Church.
I ve been an Episcopalian all my life, but I m not much of a
churchgoer. I average once or twice a year.
Edith2
Lowell: I met Edith in 1945 when I was about to enter the University of
Arizona and she was beginning her sophomore year at the
university. It would be hard to find two more different people.
I was very shy, had been very poor, but was also a confirmed
maverick ready, even eager, to go against the current. I was not
socially confident, but enjoyed rough-and-tumble sports and
hunting and had been in a few fist fights. I played on the
University of Arizona varsity football team in 1945 and rode bulls
in university rodeos, but was only a very marginal engineering
student my first two years.
Edith, on the other hand, came from a polite, refined family
which obeyed all the rules and didn t get in trouble and had had a
secure income through the Depression. Her grandfather was Godfrey
Sykes, F.R.G.S., and in addition to his long period of work for
the Carnegie Institute, he wrote a very readable autobiography
entitled A Westerly Trend, which was published by the Arizona
Pioneers Historical Society. Her father was a second-generation
English immigrant who had gone back to England for part of his
education. He was in the British army in World War I and was city
engineer of Tucson when I met Edith. Her mother was very well
educated and had been a high school English teacher. Her
grandfather had been a well-known geographer with the Carnegie
Institute. They were proper Democrats, and I had been beaten up
passing out Alf Landon buttons as a ten-year-old.
Edith, however, liked sports and earned her girls athletic
letter sweater at Arizona and always liked camping and field
trips. She was also a very good student who was a Phi Beta Kappa
2
This section, entitled "Edith," was rewritten and expanded by Mr.
Lowell during the editing process.
206
in her junior year, and a Phi Kappa Phi, and a member of every
honor society in her course of study, and the girls campus honor
societies. She had an anthropology major and geology and Spanish
minors, and later returned to get a Spanish master s degree. She
had an opportunity in Chile to write an archaeological article
which was published in the United States about tabletas de rape,
which are stone or wooden tablets or trays that were used in
hallucinogenic drug ingesting in ancient times in South America,
and her work proved that these were also being used in Mexico and
Arizona a thousand years ago.
Anyway, opposites must attract because we were married while
we were both still in school during Easter vacation, 1948. We had
almost no money, but I had a summer job in 1948, and Edith got a
job as secretary of the English Department to support us during
the 1948-1949 school year before I graduated in 1949.
I have many times wondered what factors have fallen together
which might explain the very good luck I have had professionally
and in business ventures during my career. Near the top of the
list must be Edith, who has been a balance wheel who has tried to
brake some of my wildest schemes. Her perceptions regarding human
relationships and feelings and reactions have been an
indispensible asset in putting together staffs and negotiating
deals and preventing arguments and disputes which has made my
career possible. To say nothing of her child raising and the
development of the children s sets of values and the family
friendships which we have enjoyed. Her kindness and consideration
towards me--and towards the family and all the rest of the world-
has been a very large part of my life.
Daughter Susan
Lowell :
Swent :
Lowell:
Our oldest daughter was born when we were both very young, and as
a result we have a granddaughter who is of college age this year
and another one-
Let s get their names,
the daughters names?
We have Susan s name already, but what are
The daughter who is now in Princeton is Anna. Anna is a very
impressive gal and was a National Merit finalist on the basis of
grade average. I might just hop back to Susie, who was born
October 27th, 1950, in Chihuahua City, Mexico. Susie has always
been a very serious child, and she was kind of precocious.
Learned to talk and read a little bit ahead of schedule. Through
207
her childhood she was very much an older sister with her brothers,
Has been a very good student. She was valedictorian in her high
school, National Merit scholar, and Presidential scholar. She s
always been a little bit on the shy side, but had a summer job as
a newspaper reporter--
Lowell: For two years. She got a B.A. degree in English from Stanford and
M.A. from Stanford in creative writing, and married Ross
Humphreys, who was also a summer newspaper photographer at the
same time she was with the newspaper. Susie went ahead to get a
Ph.D. from Princeton University in English literature and taught
English and creative writing at the University of Texas and then
the University of Arizona. She has published--! m not sure of the
number, but I think seven or eight books, most of which are
children s books, and they have been well received. She has won a
total of five literary prizes. One of her children s books has
been published in more than 700,000 copies.
Swent : Which one was that?
Lowell: That was Three Little Javelinas .
Granddaughters Anna and Mary
Lowell: She has two daughters. Oldest, Anna, who is in Princeton; and
younger, Mary, is in junior high school. Her husband is a
graduate of Wharton School of Finance. Was a McKenzie management
consultant and now owns and operates a publishing company in
Tucson.
Son Bill
Lowell: Our second son, Bill, was born April 18th, 1952, in Tucson. Bill
has had a variety of dyslexia, which interferes a lot with his
life. He did reasonably well through high school but struck out a
couple of times in college. He learned to be a welder and diesel
mechanic and worked with that for a long time. He most recently,
as a result of shares of stock that he had in Arequipa, has
returned to Tucson and is now taking some liberal arts classes in
the University of Arizona. He has a pilot s license and a
helicopter license and does a lot of flying.
208
Son Doug
Lowell: Our younger son, Doug, was born June 6, 1956, in Prescott,
Arizona. Doug is another one that has been very precocious in
terms of learning to walk and talk early. He s kind of a fast
thinker, fast talking, always doing unexpected things. We had to
take him to the emergency ward four times by age twelve, including
once when he rode a motorcycle over a cliff.
Swent : Before he was twelve?
Lowell: Before he was twelve [chuckles]. He was invited by a motorcycle
dealer to participate in motocross racing for the dealership.
He s also the child that I probably have the closest relationship
with of the three, although there are quite a few people that
thought it might be a good idea to kill him between age six and
twenty. But he was a National Merit finalist in high school, and
when he graduated from the University of Arizona he was admitted
to Harvard Medical School. He got an M.D. from Harvard and a
certification in general surgery at Chase Presbyterian in Chicago
and a cardiovascular certificate, University of Indiana. Spent a
year doing pediatric heart surgery at Brompton Hospital in London.
He s now practicing in Tucson and has been a success. Was a
Tucson Physician of the Year. Currently has the best open-heart
survival statistic in southern Arizona. He s married to the
daughter of a friend of ours in Nogales who lives in Tucson. They
have three daughters and a son, ranging in age from three months
to ten years.
Swent: What is his wife s name?
Lowell: Doug s wife s name is Roxanne Chernin. Roxy was a cheerleader and
prom queen. Has a master s degree and taught very successfully in
junior high and managed a business. The kids names are Marcella,
Glenton, Michelle, and Paloma. Marcella is the oldest. The
second one is Glenton, a boy. The third is Michelle. And the
last, who is only a couple of months old, is Paloma.
Swent: A little girl, I presume.
Lowell: Yes. And they re all fun kids.
Swent: Oh, I m sure. It s a lovely family.
209
Marcia Racine3
Lowell: Our Arizona secretary-office manager-exploration administrator-cow
handler-accountant-notary-paralegal for the past thirteen years is
Marcia, whom you have met. She is a very smart person, charming,
a quick learner, and has a near photographic memory. Before
moving to Arizona she worked nineteen years for a law firm where
she became qualified as a paralegal and this has been useful here
with the numerous mining contracts that we wrestle with. She also
has become a competent self-taught bookkeeper-accountant, and
working with Edith a competent computer operator and cattle
computer records person. While we were living mostly in Chile,
Marcia ran the Atascosa Ranch also. Her piece of the Arequipa
Resources windfall has made her very well off. Her husband,
Randy, is a retired public utility electrical foreman. I am not
sure whether Marcia works for me or I work for her, and whether
she is an employee or a member of the family, but it was a piece
of good luck when we met her thirteen years ago.
A Pragmatic Philosophy of Mineral Exploration
Lowell: You mentioned saying a little bit about philosophy; I have always
been interested in science but not much interested in pure science
and really only interested in applied science. My modus operandi
is to try to think of ways that scientific advances can be applied
to practical mineral exploration, and I ve had some success at
that. But I ve also had severalworked on several blind alleys,
things that didn t work out. I ve had a very pragmatic attitude,
cost-benefit, regarding how to do exploration. I ve been asked on
five or six occasions to give talks at professional meetings about
exploration philosophy and have written articles on this subject.
I started off, as I mentioned, as a mining engineer and
worked at that for a couple of years, and later part-time as a
mine manager. I ve always felt that it was a big advantage to
understand something about the production side of mining while
looking for new mines. Mining is essentially based on economic
principles and not scientific principles; ore is rock that can be
mined at a profit. I think this has been a big advantage to me in
exploration, and I ve talked to other people with similar
backgrounds who have the same feeling.
3
This section, entitled "Marcia Racine," was inserted by Mr. Lowell
during the editing process.
210
I have also made a point of not following conventional dogma
and trying new ideas and accepting risks and going against the
current. I ve always liked the poem: "He either fears his fate
too much, or his deserts are small, who dares not put it to the
touch, to gain or lose it all."
I ve tried to be honest and ethical in my work. I ve never
been arrested or charged with a crime or sued in the course of my
career. I have tried to operate on the basis of "do unto others
as you wish them to do unto you." That has a kind of a particular
application in mineral exploration because it s very much a dog-
eat-dog business. My feeling is that a person should try hard and
fight hard but remember the rules while you re fighting.
[There are obviously a long list of people who have
contributed to my career, but three I will mention are Chuck
Pillar, Alex Sutulov, and Nicolas Tschichow.
Chuck Pillar is a mining engineer from Rolla School of Mines
in Missouri and is now about eighty-five years old. I first met
Chuck when he was assistant manager of the San Manuel mine in
Arizona. He was given most of the technical credit for developing
the block caving system at San Manuel which was a pioneering
effort. He later went on to work as a consultant in most of the
block caving mines of the world and for a number of years was
considered the world expert on block caving. In about 1970 he
became vice president of operations for Placer Development Mining
Co. in Vancouver (now Placer Dome). He hired me in 1970 on a
several-years retainer to be Placer s geology consultant on mine
operation problems and as a sort of supervisor for all of their
resident geologists. When he retired from Placer he joined me for
several years in a consulting firm we called Pillar, Lowell and
Associates. Chuck is a very honest, determined, decisive person
who has a genius for solving mine development problems. More than
anyone I have known, he is able to separate the important parts of
a problem from the unimportant and put his finger on a specific,
often very simple, solution. It was very valuable in my
professional development to work with and to observe Chuck
Pillar s thinking and management skills.
Alexander Sutulov was the person who hired me as a
consultant to work for Codelco and other Chilean government
divisions in 1974 after the Allende group was thrown out. Alec
was director of CIMM (Centre de Investigaciones Mineras y
Metallurgias) . His father had been a general in the Russian army
who fled Russia when the Bolsheviks took over. Alec had degrees
in metallurgy and emigrated from Europe to Chile, probably in the
1950s, and had had a successful career as a metallurgist and
mineral economist, but had to leave Chile when Allende came into
211
office. Alec was hired as a metallurgy professor by the
University of Utah from 1970 to 1973.
I became a close friend in Chile of the Sutulovs and used
Alec as a sort of advisor and mentor. At the time of his death in
about 1990 he had published over thirty books. He was an
internationally famous mineral economist and probably the world
expert on the refining and economics of molybdenum. He asked me
to write a section in one of his books and he gave me advice and
encouragement in various ways.
Nicolas Tschichow is a Russian immigrant to Chile who was
born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) about 1936. Both his father
and mother were professors in the University of Leningrad and his
father became an unwilling officer in the Russian army who was
wounded in the siege of Stalingrad. In the shuffling of the
German-Russian lines during the battle Nicolas and his mother and
father were caught behind the German lines and then became
displaced persons who progressively migrated across Europe, and at
the end of the war immigrated to Chile. Nicolas (Nic) was
something of a prodigy and obtained a chemistry degree in Chile
and an M.S. in metallurgy in the U.S. He went to work for Codelco
and was rapidly promoted. He had to flee from Chile when the
communist government came in 1970 and he was given a job as a mill
superintendent in the U.S. by Hecla Mining Company. When the
Pinochet government came in, Nic was hired as general manager of
the Chuquicamata Mine, then the largest mine in the world. He
managed Chuquicamata for a number of years and was then manager of
the Disputada Mine for Exxon.
I first met Nic when he was working for Codelco and we later
became close friends and went on many trout fishing trips together
in southern Chile. Nic is my closest friend in Chile.]*
I can t think of anything else to add to that. Do you have
some questions?
Swent : That s a wonderful summation, and you ve surely proved that you
can be successful and humane at the same time. There were a few
more little detailed questions that I have. You didn t mention
anything about going to China. Bob Shoemaker had spoken of the
trip that you took with him to China, and maybe you took others.
Bracketed section was inserted by Mr. Lowell during the editing
process .
212
Travels to China
Lowell: I ve made two trips to China, and I m currently called a special
adviser for a company called Zen, which is trying to develop mines
in China.
Swent: That doesn t sound very pragmatic [laughter].
Lowell: I m fond of most of the Chinese people that I have met in China,
but--
Swent: What was the occasion for your trips?
Lowell: Well, the first trip was a people-to-people sort of junket trip.
I was talked into going because a couple of friends--one were
going and asked me to go. One was Charles Meyer, who was at
Berkeley.
Swent: He was on our original advisory committee for this oral history
series .
Lowell: Well, that s interesting. Another was Harold Courtright.
Swent: He [Meyer] died too soon, unfortunately.
Lowell: Charlie Meyer was one of the handful of best porphyry copper
geologists and also said to be a very good teacher.
Swent: So you went to China with Chuck and Virginia Meyer.
Lowell: Yes.
Swent: I see. And the Courtrights.
Lowell: I gave a number of talks in China, on that trip. We had a Chinese
interpreter whose name was Mrs. Chin, who was a young lady who is
a very bright, well-educated gal. She had been assigned the job
of shoveling coal into a furnace during the Cultural Revolution
and almost died as a result. Edith got sick during our trip, got
something like pneumonia on our first trip to China, and she had
to be dropped off at a hospital. They left Mrs. Chin with us to
help out. She was in the hospital for two days, I think. First
and last, we got very well acquainted with Mrs. Chin. She s
written letters to us a number of times, and we get pictures of
her little boy and Christmas cards and so on.
The second trip was for DuPont . I participated in that one,
I think, as a result of Bob Shoemaker s suggestion. Bob Shoemaker
213
Swent :
Lowell:
is a very well-known metallurgist who was president of American
Institute of Mining Engineers, Society of Mining Engineers. Bob
and I worked together for Bechtel on feasibility studies and have
since had other projects in common. Bob was one of a couple of
people that went over to China as metallurgical specialists. I
wrote a paper called "Geology and Mining of Gold" for the
symposium.
We had talks for two or three days in Chingdao and then went
out and visited gold mines and plants and so forth. One of the
DuPont people with me was a young fellow named Tom Kuo. Tom was a
super-impressive American of Chinese ancestry and had a degree
from Caltech and a degree from MIT and was a very charming fellow.
He was grandson of one of Chiang Kai-Shek s generals in the civil
war in China. He took us--took Edith and myself --over to see
Chiang Kai-Shek s summer home, which was at Chingdao.
He still had relatives in China and relatives in Taiwan, and
he was able to give us a very interesting insight into the
evolution of the Chinese political situation and the relationship
of offshore Chinese to people living in China.
When were these trips?
Well, I don t remember. The first trip was probably about 1980
and the second trip about 1990.
Other Travels in Asia and the South Pacific
Lowell: I ve also worked elsewhere around the Orient. I ve made a couple
of trips to Thailand and did a little work in Taiwan and worked in
Fiji Island and Australia, and have been to Papua New Guinea a
number of times and spent a few days at Bougainville during the
construction phase of the Bougainville Copper Company.
Ok Tedi Mine
Swent: Do you want to say anything more about any of those things?
Lowell: Well, I worked twice at Ok Tedi before construction started at Ok
Tedi. It s in the Star Mountains, central part of the island of
New Guinea, and at that time was an extremely isolated location.
It s on the Fly River, a huge river. Of course, that s not
Visit to Migilsimbip Village near Ok Tedi, Papua New Guinea, 1973.
David Lowell and Migilsimbip natives.
Ok Tedi, New Guinea, 1973: David Lowell on outcrop of the Gold Coast
scarn orebody.
214
exactly true. It s near the Fly River. They were doing water
monitoring, streams, as a preliminary to building a plant when I
was there. It s a real jungle area. The year I was there, the
rainfall was over 500 inches. It was the highest rainfall of any
weather station in the world at that time. Traveling around was
difficult. We moved around mostly by helicopter.
I became acquainted with the hydrologist who was checking
weirs and creeks and so on, rain gauges. I had inquired if it
would be possible to see any of the natives while I was there.
The hydrologist invited me to go with him on a helicopter trip one
day to visit the only native village that was near Ok Tedi. Papua
New Guinea was not by any means densely populated. The jungle is
a very unproductive place for human habitation, and there were
only small villages, widely scattered, in that part of New Guinea.
The one we went to was called Migilsimbip. They had had
their first view of white people something like eight years
before. They were still probably practicing cannibals. Fairly
unclothed as far as clothing goes, not totally naked but largely
so. We took along an interpreter who was from that village, and
who spoke pidgin English as well as local language. He showed us
something that was called the boys house. It s a place where
boys are put to live when they re something like six or seven
years old and they stay there until they become men and they re
taught to be warriors and do all the things that they re supposed
to do .
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowe 1 1 :
Another house was the only building that was painted. There
were probably a total of fifteen buildings in this village. I
asked the interpreter what that was, and he said, "That where we
keep the bones of the people and the pigs." The pigs were a food
source, but they were also considered sort of part of the
population. We saw some women that had one elongated breast. The
interpreter said that that was caused by suckling pigs.
Oh, my goodness!
So they were pretty primitive stuff. In the boys house there
were some little packages tied up in leather on the wall, and
spears and axes and stuff, and bows and arrows. I asked the
interpreter what these little obviously sacred packages were, and
he said, "Well, they re parts of the enemies." [laughs]
Oh, my. That was quite an experience.
threat to you.
But they weren t any
No, no. In my various trips to--the only sort of threatening
natives that I ever saw were on Bougainville Island, which is
215
politically part of New Guinea but is really a different culture.
They looked like pretty mean customers, sort of glowered and
threatening. I was with a Bechtel engineer, and there was a
fellow going down the street with an umbrella in one hand and a
bow and arrow in the other hand. I said, "Stop. I would like to
take a picture of him." I thought it was kind of a humorous
picture. He said, "Oh, I wouldn t advise you to do that." He
said, "I tried to take a picture of a fellow with a bow and arrow
once, and when I got the camera focused he had the arrow notched
and was pointing it at me." [laughs] And later the same group
rebelled against authorities and took over the mine, and CRA has
never gotten the mine back.
Skin Diving in Truk Lagoon
Lowell: My principal hobby has been skin diving. In some of my commuting
back and forth across the Pacific, I arranged to stop at Truk
Lagoon. I was by myself, but I was able to hire a Trukese fellow
who got us some tanks, and we dove for a couple of days on sunken
Japanese ships. One of the interesting things he knew about was
in the hull of a Japanese transport. We had a light and went back
through stairways and passageways. There was a Japanese Zero
airplane stacked in with gasoline barrels. I was able to climb
with my tanks into the seat of the Zero [chuckles], ninety feet
below the surface of the water.
Swent: That s quite an adventure.
Lowell: The Japanese had come back after the war and put up a shrine in
that ship, part of the Shinto religion.
Frisco Mines ##
Swent: One more thing on my list was Frisco Mines.
Lowell: Frisco Mines is a medium-sized Mexican mining company. It is a
company that some time ago asked for my help in a consulting
capacity, and I ve made a number of trips to Mexico and gotten
well acquainted with some of the managers of Frisco. I guess for
me the interesting thing about Frisco Mines is how good a job they
do. There s a kind of a rule of thumb in the mining industry that
the people who need consultation least are the ones that ask for
it most. Frisco is a case in point. They know enough about their
Swent :
216
problems to understand that it is cost-effective to find
specialists and experts in various little problems to bring in to
help solve the problems.
At the time I worked in Mexico, from 1949 to 1951, in
general the level of capability of Mexican-educated mining
engineers was significantly lower than American-educated mining
engineers. But now, forty-five years later, I think that this is
not as much the case. A number of Frisco engineers would be top-
notch guys in most any mining organization, and their geologists
also do a good job. Factors like the Frisco tons per man-shift in
underground mines are very impressive.
Are these people who have received their training in the States or
have been trained-
Lowell: No, they ve been trained in Mexico. I think there may be one or
two that have gone to graduate school in the U.S., but they re by
and large Mexican-educated engineers.
Comparing Mexico and Chile
Swent: We re getting short of time, but you had said earlieryou said
something rather disparaging about Mexican government and you
thought the Chilean government was the best. In fact, you implied
it might even be better than ours. You were kind of joking, I
think [chuckles], but you might just say a little bit about
comparing them.
Lowell: Well, I think a common misconception of Americans is if they ve
been to Juarez or Tijuana they think they know all there is to
know about all of Latin America.
Swent: That s unfortunate, isn t it?
Lowell: I have worked in eight or ten Latin American countries, and my
impression was that every one was, in general, very different from
the others. Mexico is unique also. Part of the history of Mexico
that I think influences its culture is its uncomfortable proximity
to the United States. It s kind of a love-hate relationship.
It s Americanized, which improves their level of efficiency, but
the Mexicans remember clearly the two wars that they fought with
the United States and lost.
I don t know whether that in itself has anything to do with
the level of corruption, but I have never been in a country where
217
the frequency of asking for bribes is as high as in Mexico. On
the other hand, the people tend to be artistic and hospitable and
do a lot of singing and dancing and give better parties than
anybody anywhere.
Chile is a totally different ballgame. Eighty percent of
the Chilean population is of European ancestry, like the United
States. The mix of countries of national origin is large in
Chile, as in the United States. The principal countries of origin
are Spain, England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, the United States,
Germany (there s a big German colony), and a lot of French people.
Chile has had a selected immigration. Beginning a hundred and
fifty years ago, they accepted people only who could demonstrate
that they had a trade or were educated or had a profession or were
landed immigrants that had money to begin a business. In that
sense, Chile is different from almost all of the other Latin
American countries. Chile is often compared with Argentina, but
the immigration in Argentina was more selectively from Italy.
That s not the case in Chile.
When we lived in Chile, we had season tickets to the opera.
We re not real opera fans, but that was one of the entertainments
available there that we had not had a chance to have in Arizona.
In one of the operas we attended, there was a ceremony that
commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the opera house in
Santiago. It occurred to me that a hundred years ago in Arizona
what people there were were living under trees or in trees
[chuckles] .
It s a very civilized country, and the quality of the public
education is significantly better than in the U.S., and the
general culture of the peoplethey re more courteous and polite
and there are much stronger family ties, and they re more
religious. At least during Mr. Pinochet s time as president, the
level of crime was much lower than in the United States. Now it s
about the same. When Pinochet was voted out of office and
replaced by Aylwin, one of the Chileans made the remark to me that
"we
say we re having an attack of democracy." [chuckles] That s
about right.
So what else would you like to--
Swent: That s very interesting and very good to have on the record, I
think, that you had such a fine experience in Chile.
Lowell: I ve frankly felt pretty comfortable in almost every country that
I ve worked in. The one notable exception is Nigeria in Africa.
218
A Negative Experience in Nigeria
Swent: You mentioned that you d been to Nigeria. What were you doing
there?
Lowell: 1 was there talking to the government about possible mining
contracts. It became immediately apparent that I wasn t cut out
to work in Nigeria [chuckles]. Left a few days later.
Swent: What made it so apparent?
Lowell: Oh, they were just frankly, unashamedly talking about dividing up
the loot between government officials and various officials in the
foreign company, and there were crimes being committed in all
directions .
Swent: When was this?
Lowell: It was about eight or ten years ago.
Swent: Fairly recently. Lagos, you said?
Lowell: Yes. Awful place!
Swent: You were thinking of going in as an individual, independent?
Lowell: Yes. Well, with backing by a company.
Swent: I see.
Lowell: That s kind of the name of the game in exploration, is to find
opportunities that have opened up in other parts of the world.
I worked twice, for a few weeks each time, in Iran. This
was during the period of the Shah of Iran. I mistakenly thought
that Iran was a very progressive, well-organized, peaceful
country. But as soon as a religious fanatic element got control,
it evidently changed a hundred and eighty degrees.
Swent: And now you ve come full circle, right back to living a few miles
from where you were born.
Lowell: That s right.
Swent: That s pretty wonderful. You have traveled all around the world
and been everywhere and done everything, and you re right back
where your roots are.
219
Lowell: Well, that s partly true and partly not true. In two days I m
leaving for Chile on a trip.
Swent: [chuckles] No, I don t mean that you have stopped at all. But
you have remained--! think it s wonderful that you ve been able to
maintain your connections here so strongly with all of this
traveling.
Lowell: It s kind of "Be it ever so humble, there s no place like home."
[chuckles]
Collecting Mine Lamps
Swent :
Lowell;
That s right. You haven t mentioned your lamp collection,
been looking at it.
We ve
Swent :
Lowell:
Well, human beings are divided into two groups. There are lumpers
and splitters, and there are junk collectors and junk thrower-
outers [chuckles]. I m firmly in the category of being a junk
collector. I have a collection of mine lamps that come from
Arizona and Nevada and Philippines and Peru and Chile, and I have
a couple of oil lamps from Iran. It s a kind of a hit-or-miss
collection. Probably half of my lamps are oil lamps, were
originally whale oil lamps in the 1800s; and half are carbide
lamps. Ignoring the very old Persian lamps, which probably
weren t used in the mines, but the others range in age from maybe
two hundred and fifty or three hundred years old to a few years
old.
I have a carbide lamp from Chile. The small, independent
miners are called pirquineros in Chile. I have a carbide lamp
that was in use at the time I acquired it, made by a pirquinero
out of two tin cans. A small-diameter tin can in the middle and a
large-diameter upside down on the outside. The inner can has a
small hole punched in it, and there s a hasp, a ring to hang the
lamp. You put the carbide in the middle and the water outside,
and there s a device on the top for adjusting the pressure between
the two cans to regulate the flow of water. It works quite well
[chuckles] .
Very ingenious.
I suppose I have a total of about, oh, thirty-five or forty lamps.
220
Swent: And a whole wall full of awards. We ve mentioned most of those, I
think, in the text, or you have them listed in your notes here.
The lion. Did you--is that something you hunted? Mountain lion.
Atascosa Ranch
Lowell: Yes. That s a lion that I shot in a cave on our ranch. Mountain
lions are relatively abundant. There are now more than there ever
were because of less hunting. They re a significant economic
problem in raising cattle. We had twenty-one calves killed by
lions one year, and we probably averaged a few every year in the
twenty-five years that we ve had the ranch.
Swent :
Lowell:
Swent :
Lowell:
You want to hear a Wild West story about shooting the lion?
Do we have time?
Yes, we do.
And we also didn t mention your acquiring the ranch,
about the lion first.
So tell
Okay. This particular lion--a first cousin of mine, whose name is
Douglas Gumming, owns the ranch immediately north of ours. For
many years Doug had a pack of black and tan hounds that he used
for hunting lions, which happened every time calves started being
killed. I had been riding on our ranchthis all happened fifteen
or twenty years agoone day and came in. I got a call from Doug
saying that he had wounded a lion that was in a cave up on a very
rough part of his ranch, and asked me if I would like to go up
with him, and we d have to dispatch it after dark, probably.
When he thought he had shot the lion, he had had one or two
of his dogs with him, who had cornered the lion. I guess the
story was it was first in a tree and he had had a little .22
pistol in his saddlebag, and he had shot at the lion and thought
he had hit it, and it jumped down from the tree and ran into a
cave. He thought it might still be in the cave.
I was already tired, but I got another horse and rode with
him. It was a two-hour ride, I guess, up to the place where the
cave was. We had flashlights and we shined the lights in the cave
and crawled in. There was a back door to the cave that he hadn t
realized, and so the lion hadn t been cornered in the cave. It
had run in one side and had sneaked out the other side. There was
221
no evidence that it had been f-hot, either. As it turned out, it
had not been shot.
Doug, who was kind of an expert lion hunter, thought that it
might still be around in the vicinity. This first cave was a slab
of rock in a slope where a cliff had caved off some time in the
past, and there were many large rocks, some of which had spaces
underneath that made caves. So we had four or five lion hounds
and one little terrier-beagle hound cross, whose name was Gypsy,
who had come along for the expedition.
So we started looking under these other rocks, and they were
spread over maybe two hundred yards and on a steep slope. It was
hard to get up the slope. I carried Gypsy under my arm, and I had
a .30-. 30 rifle and a flashlight also. We had to boost the lion
hounds up some of these little cliffs in order to get them up.
Each rock we came to I inserted Gypsy s nose under the rock to
watch for her reaction, and she didn t react until finally, some
time later, we found a house-sized rock, and I was ahead of Doug,
and I stuck Gypsy s head under the rock, and she cringed.
I called down to Doug and told him that. He said, "Well,
that isn t necessarily a lion. It could be a bobcat or a javelina
or a coatimundi." And he was going through this list. And then
there was a noise that went "WRRRRAAOW." And he said, "But in
this case it is a lion." [chuckles] By this time, it was getting
dark. We looked under the rock. There were two openings under
the rock. We shined our lights. Couldn t see the cat. There was
a crack in the rock, and Doug got up on top with a lasso. Tied a
rock to the end of it and banged it around.
I was at the second opening, kind of cowering behind a
little six-inch-diameter oak tree. In case the lion ran out that
way, I might get a shot at it. Doug was by the original hole, but
the lion would growl when the rock banged around, but wouldn t
come out. We did this for a couple of hours. The lion had killed
a calf that day, and I finally decided to crawl in the hole and
with my flashlight and rifle, I crawled in a ways and I could
finally see part of the lion.
Lined the rifle and the flashlight up and shot it. There
was lots of thrashing around, and I scooted out as fast as I
could.
Swent: And this is the lion?
Lowell: This is the lion.
Swent: It s a beautiful pelt.
222
Lov;ell: By that time, it was pitch dark, and we skinned the lion with
considerable difficulty. The slope was a steep slope. Then
couldn t see anything to guide the horses, but the horses found
their way back without--
Swent: Where did you shoot it? Because there s no sign of--
Lowell: Well, it was the first bullet [moving to the animal] hit just
about the tail and angled back this way.
Swent: It s in beautiful shape, isn t it?
Buying the Atascosa Ranch
Swent: You bought the ranch, you said, in 74?
Lowell: Seventy-five.
Swent: And it had been your uncle s ranch.
Lowell: Yes. An uncle of mine had been co-owner of the ranch back in the
1920s. This was an uncle who died before I was born. At the time
of his death it had gone out of the family and had had a couple of
different owners. We bought it back in 1975.
Swent: It must have been a great pleasure.
Lowell: Yes. We were optimistically thinking we were going to make a
profit from raising cattle. We have a number of years, but cattle
ranching has gotten less and less profitable with the increasing
number of regulations and environmentalists and low beef price in
the United States.
Swent: It s a wonderful place to live, though.
Lowell: Yes, that s the reason.
Swent: We re going to have to stop. I ve had a wonderful time here
taping these interviews. Thank you very much for sharing your
recollections.
Lowell: Good.
Transcribed by Him Eisenberg/WordCraft
Final Typed by Shannon Page
223
TAPE GUIDE- -David Lowell
Interview 1: September 15, 1998
Tape 1,
Tape 1,
Tape 2,
Tape 2,
Tape 3,
Tape 3,
Tape 4,
Tape 4,
Tape 5,
Tape 5,
Tape 6,
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A
Interview 2: September 16, 1998
Continue Tape 6, Side A
Tape 6, Side B
Tape 7, Side A
Tape 7, Side B
Tape 8, Side A
Tape 8, Side B
Tape 9, Side A
Tape 9, Side B
Tape 10, Side A
Tape 10, Side B
Tape 11, Side A
Tape 11, Side B
Interview 3: September 17, 1998
Tape 12, Side A
Tape 12, Side B
13
13
Tape
Tape
Tape 14,
Tape 14,
Side A
Side B
Side A
Side B
Tape 15, Side A
Tape 15, Side B not recorded
1
8
17
24
31
39
47
55
64
72
79
87
87
94
102
108
114
121
128
137
146
153
161
169
175
182
189
197
207
215
APPENDIX
"On the Roof of the World," Santa Cruz Surf. July 18, 1918 224
Resume, J. David Lowell 226
"Copper Resources in 1970," The 1970 Jackling Award Lecture,
MininR Engineering. April 1970 231
J. David Lowell, MMSA Biography, October 1998 238
American Mining Hall of Fame 1994 Medal of Merit Recipient
J. David Lowell, from Twelfth Annual Awards Presentation,
December 3, 1994 239
"Palabras del Senor James David Lowell en la Ceremonia de su
Doctorado Honoris Causa por la Universidad Nacional Mayor
de San Marcos," Lima, 14 de Agosto de 1998 [with English
translation following] 240
"Thrill Seeker," Canadian Business. October 1996 257
MMSA Gold Medal Candidate Information 264
"Pierina: a billion dollar mountain," The Southern Miner.
Fall 1996 270
Cartoon from The Northern Miner, [n.d.] 272
"Barrick Gold Plans to Make Offer Of $669.5 Million to Buy
Arequipa," Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1996 273
"Golden girl," London Financial Times, July 12, 1996 274
"Arequipa sale nets founder C$87tn," Financial Times, August
19, 1996 275
224
SlN(i, ,11 LY is. 1!1S. SANTA CRUZ SURF PAGE TWO
OK THE ROOF (FUtO.
A Santa Cruz Girl in the Heart of the Andes in Peru.
A letter has been received from Mrs.
A. 0. Lowell (nee Lavina dimming) [
from I ern After a journey of -U days.
which has taken her over the Amies.
she Dually reached her il.-M inalion
ill- the head waters of the Amazon.
"Minas do Santu\ Domingo Carabaya."
i She writes: i
I
Tin
! nillv
trip ovi-r the And -s \\.is wondor-
braiitiiul ami
wo reached tin
mot IIP. Oli. M
Iv.ti Hilly cold.
-
pass, a snow
n- bitterness of
siorm
that pi -rcin^ cold! Tin air at 17.000
|
feet. So thin and ponetratin::. No i
amount of clothlnK Booms any protoc- j
[ion. Tlic pass is indcBcritiably bounti
ful. Snow covers everything except
the two lakes below. One gleams
green and the other blue. I wonder
why.
Some of the peaks have snow banked
against them in places 30 feet deep.
Rc-fori- reaching the pass we drove
iliru the ruins of an Inca village. Al-
tho millions of acres of level land wore
m-ar enough for them to usi:, they, In
preference to using them, terraced off
the mountainsides, HE Is done in China.
I wondered at this until a Peruvian ex
plained to me that plains growing on a
hillside ure in less danger of freezing
than those In the open. I don t think I
will ever tire of looking at these won
derful mountains. As Mrs. Adams
says: "Peru may be likened to a tall,
gray stone house, with a steep flight
of steps leading up to the roof. From
this bleak roof rises the highest chim
ney peaks of the Americas." But be
yond this drab house lies nature s love-
iest garden.
Within an hour after starting down
he eastern side a difference Is noted in
he temperature. The trail winds
around and around always the last
oop Is hundreds of feet higher than
hat part of the trail on which one Is
tHndlng. Sometimes the river is so
ar btlow that even Its roaring can not
be heard. At other points the trail
drops so near to the river that one
wonders if there are any trout in the
Jeep pools so close.
arc fast on the edge of it. However,
we have bananas, pineapples, wild par
rots, monki NS and boa constrictors
\\ e are t|iiili sati.slh il to enjoy those
fi.itnros of the jungle without sot-king
farther for inc. No fevers here ever.
This place was written up in thr No
vember, 191 U, number of the Ladies
lloni 1
Journal. The article was cn i-
tietl "Sliding Off the World s Hoof."
The naturalist, Mr. \\atkins. is still
iii TO and a \\-r\ active member ol oar
ittle colony
225
In tome places the canyon narrowp
o that the trail crosses to the other
side, and the intervening space Is
spanned by means of swinging bridges
hung on cables. Some are only baby
affairs like the bridge atjbe Big Trees,
only none has railings, while others of
the 14 are very long, and they sway
like hammocks as one ridrs dver (I
sometimes walked). This (Aounlunl)
canyon is said to be one of the loveliest
In the Americas. Every variety of
tropical verdure is found here. Count
less silvery water falls come tumbling
down the mountainsides. Only a few
of the most beautiful ones have names.
Of these 1 think the Lagrimas de Marie
(Tears of Mary) Is the most beaAiful.
Red, rose and white begonias arc on
every side, and, In places swaying from
the banks over the trail, wild cosmos,
great, gorgeous crimson lilies and
countless flowers, trees, ferns and
bushes, that 1 have never heard of be
fore, much less know the names of.
And the loveliest flowers of all are the
orchids. I would like to watch the ex
pression on Dr. Parker s face as he
walked along one of our trails here in
camp and discovered the real, rare
ones. The first Sunday that we were
here Arthur climbed down a very steep
mountain side and chopped a clump of
crimson beauties from a tree for me. 1
carefully planted my first orchid
plants in a box and enjoyed them all
evening. Next morning I placed the
box out doors so that our dally shower
would <i.mi|ien (lie earth iiiHiund them
Soon alone comes Jerry Brinkman (it
mule) and my crimson orchids were a
memory!
Our rainfall is truly groat. Last
>eai
il w,is 1 jij inches, or ovi-r ~ i l>
This is the dry season, and il has rain
ed every day since we have been here.
G. Caesar! If this is the dry season I
expect we will both be web footed be
fore the wet season is over!
This is not the jungle proper. \\ e
PRESENT:
EDUCATION
226
RESUME
J. DAVID LOWELL
CONSULTING GEOLOGIST
Owner
Lowell Mineral Exploration
789 Av. Beatriz
Rio Rico, AZ 85648
Tele: (520)281-8271, 281-8866; FAX: (520)281-7019
Owner
Lowell Mineral Exploration Ltda.
Huerfanos 835, Piso 17, Of. 1702
Santiago, Chile
Principal
Minerals Advisory Group
3480 Britannia Dr.. Suite 100
Tucson, AZ 85706
Tele: (520)889-1069, FAX (520)889-2733
Manager and Member
CAP fl. LLC
789 Av. Beairi?
Rio Rico, AZ 85648
1949 - BS Min Engr, University of Arizona
1957 -
MS Geology, Stanford University
1959 - E. Geol., University of Arizona
1961 -Present: Consulting geologist 100 U. S. and foreign mining and engineering
companies and governments. Consultant on geological, mine design, and
grade control problems. Participated in 13 major feasibility studies.
Managed contract exploration projects which discovered Kalamazoo and
Casa Grande West orebodies in the U.S. and La Escondida, Zaldivar. and
San Cristobal orebodies in Chile. Member of discover}, teams for Veko!
Hills. AZ: JA BC Canada; Dizon and FSE-Lepanto, Philippines; Leonor.
Chile; Los Calatos & Pierina Peru. Director, IMD1 S.A., operator San
Cristobal 10,000 TPD gold mine in Chile. Former Chairman of the Board
Arequipa Resources Ltd., Vancouver, Canada.
227
J. David Lowell
Page 2
1 959- 1 96 1 : District Geologist, Utah Construction Co.,
San Francisco and Tucson.
1956-1959: Chief Geologist, Southwest Ventures, Tucson,
Arizona, Mine Manager, Menlove Dalton Mine 1956-57.
1 954- 1 956: Graduate Student, Stanford University
1951-1954: Geologist to District Geol., USAEC, Grand Junction, Colorado
1 949- 1 95 1 :
Engineer to Mine Foreman, Asarco, Santa Eulalia, Mexico
Memberships
and Awards: Member AIME; Society of Economic Geologists; Arizona Registered
Geologist and Mining Engineer; 1970 AIME Daniel Jackling Award; 1972
Distinguished Citizen Award University of Arizona; 1974 Distinguished
Lecturer Canadian Institute Mining and Metallurgy; 1975-80 Associate
Editor Economic Geology; 1977 Thayer Lindsley Distinguished Lecture:
Society of Econonic Geolgists: 1982 Society of Economic Geologists
Medal for excellence in mineral exploration. 1994 American Mining Hal!
of Fame Medal of Merit recipient.
228
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLICATIONS, J. DAVID LOWELL
"Application of Cross Stratification Mapping to Problems of Uranium Exploration";
Economic Geology, 1954.
"Occurrence of Uranium in Sethlakai Dietreme"; American Journal of Science. 1956.
"Mineralized Breccia Pipes, Copper Basin, Arizona"; W.P. Johnston and J. David
Lowell. Economic Geology. 1958.
"Highway Geologic Map of Arizona"; J. David Lowell, Chairman of Publication and
Editorial Committee, Arizona Geological Society, 1967.
"Geology of the Kalamazoo Orebody"; Economic Geology. 1968, Vol. 63, pp 645-654.
"Putassic Alteration in Porphyry Copper Deposits"; J. M. Guilbert and J. David Lowell,
GSA Annual Meeting Abstracts, 1968.
"Zoning in Porphyry Deposits"; GSA Annual Meeting Abstracts, 1969.
"Lateral and Vertical Alteration-Mineralization Zoning in Porphyry Ore Deposits"; J.
David Lowell and J. M. Guilbert, Economic Geology. June-July 1970, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp
373-408.
"Copper Resources in 1970"; A1ME Daniel Jackling Award Lecture published in Mining
Engineering and in Transactions of A1ME, 1970.
"Zonaicion de Depositor Porfidicos"; J. M. Guilbert and J. DaviJ Lowell, Abstracts of
Annual Meeting of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of Mexico, 1972.
Book Review: "Molybdenum Deposits of Japan"; Economic Geology. 1972.
Book Review: "A
global Approach to Geology"; Economic Geology, 1973.
"Regional Characteristics of Porphyry Ore Deposits of the Southwest Province"; AIME
Preprint, 1973.
"Variations in Zoning Patterns in Porphyry Ore Deposits"; J. M. Guilbert and J. David
Lowell. CIM Bulletin, 1974.
"Regional Characteristics of Porphyry Copper Deposits of the Southwest"; Economic
Geology, August, 1 974, Vol. 69, No. 5, pp 60 1 -6 1 7.
229
"Three New Porphyry Copper Mines for Chile?"; Mining Engineering. November, 1974,
pp 22-28.
1974 CIMM Distinguished Lecture "the
Unique Character of Porphyry Intrusions"; J.
David Lowell.
"How the Kalamazoo Was Found"; J. David Lowell, Case Histories of Mineral
Discoveries, Vol. 3, pp 29-32, Benchmarks in Geology, 1974.
"Geology and Economics of South American Porphyry CU Deposits"; World Mining.
June, 1 975, pp 32-37.
1975 University of Chile Short Course, "The Practical Aspects of Mineral Exploration";
J. David Lowell, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile.
"Strategy of Mineral Exploration"; Proceedings of N.S.F. Workshop, Pennsylvania Slate
University, October. 1976.
"Trends and Techniques in Southwest Porphyry Exploration"; World Mining. October,
1976, pp 5 5- 5 9.
"Land Availability and Governmental Controls as Related to Exploration of Specific Ore
Systems"; Leo J. Miller and J. David Lowell, S.E.G. Meeting, Vaneou\er, April, 1977.
Book Ke\iew: "Proceedings
of the I list international Conference on the Ne\\ Basement
Tectonics". Economic Geology. Mav. 1977.
"The
Porphyry Model"; chapter in Encyclopedia of Molybdenum. 1978.
197S Soc. Of Econ. Geol. Thayer Lindsley Distinguished Lecture: "Structure and
Alteration Setting of Porphyr) Coppers".
"Metal logenesis and porphyry deposits of North America and the Pacific Region"; J.
David Lowell, Proceedings of International Geological Congress, Paris, France, 1980.
"Geology of the Casa Grande West Porphyry Copper Deposit"; J. David Lowell, L. C.
Arnold. S. Van Nort. John Stone & Robert Blair, Paper given at the Arizona Section
AIM I:
Meeting, 1981.
"Exploration for Basemetal Deposits"; A1ME Surface Mining Volume, in press.
"Evolution of Geologic Techniques in Exploration", J. David Lowell, Paper at the Soc.
Econ. Geol. Annual Meeting, March, 1985.
230
"Exploration of the La Escondida Porphyry Copper Deposit; Chile"; J. David Lowell,
James A. Bratt, Francisco Ortiz, Nivaldo Rojas, Patrick Burns, Paper at the Soc. Econ.
Geol. Annual Meeting, March, 1986.
"Chilean Ore Deposits and Mineral Belts"; Carlos Ruiz F. & J. David Lowell, Paper at
Soc. Econ. Geol. Annual Meeting, March, 1986.
"El Yacimiento Aurifero San Cristobal"; J. David Lowell & Julia Aspillaga, Revista
Mineria, Santiago, Chile, Nov., 1987.
1987 "Geology and Mining of Gold"; J. David Lowell, Preprint, China Gold
Technology/NaCN Safety Seminar, Quingdao, China.
"Gold Mineralization in Porphyry Deposits"; J. David Lowell, Mining Engineering.
1989.
"The La Escondid;i Exploration Project"; p 263, Proceedings Vol. Ill, Pacific Rim
Congress. 1990.
"Chilean Ore Deposits and Mineral Belts"; Carlos Ruiz Fuller <t J. D. Lowell, p 275, Vol.
Ill, Pacific rim Congress 1990.
"Discovery of the Escondida Oiebodv"; Economic Geology. Monographs 8, 1991, pp
30(1-313.
"Potential i or New Giant Copper Porphyry Deposits in Peru"; J. Da\id 1 owell. Randol
International Conference. October 30, 1993, Vancouver.
Kevnoic Addie.-^. "Comparilive Prospectiv itv in ihe Andes: Where are the New
Discoveries?"; J. David Lowell, Investment Opportunities in the Andes Conference,
Melbourne. Australia, August 1993.
"I
oieign Mining Investment in Peru"; J. David Lowell, Investment Opportunities in the
Andes Conference, Melbourne, Australia, August, 1993.
"The Richards and Couiiright Era and Why Some Exploration Programs Are Successful";
J. David Lowell. Arizona Geological Society Digest 20. 1Q95, Porphyry Copper Deposits
oi die American Cordilleia.
"Strateuy
In A Venture/Exploration Company"; J. David Lowell, Corporate Strategy in
Mining 1997 Mineral Economics Symposium, Cordillera Roundup, Vancouver, B.C.
Canada.
"The Low Tech, Low Budget. Exploration Approach"; J. David Lowell, Pathways 98,
Vancouver, B.C., Canada, January. 1998.
231
The 1970 Jackling Award Lecture
J. DAVID LOWELL
Recipient of the 1970 D. C. Jackling Award
For his contributions to the yield o/ min
ing geology, a striking example being his
brilliant interpretation of the complex
geologic history o/ the San Manuel Dis
trict (Final County, Arizona) which re
sulted in the discovery of the Kalamazoo
orebody. and for his lecture. "Copper Re
sources in 1970."
COPPER RESOURCES IN 1970
J. David Lowell
Consulting Geologist, Tucson, Arizona
On
a low desert ridge six miles
south of Cairo lie the remains
of the world s earliest known mining
town, Maadi of predynastk- Egypt.
Copper artifacts, including ingots
and an ax head which was spoiled
in casting, indicate that copper ore
was smelted in Maadi, and radio
carbon dating has placed the ac
tivity at least as early as 3300 B.C.
This is the oldest documented date
for the use of smelted copper, the
first industrial metal used by man.
Copper was mined and smelted
almost as early in Asia Minor and
on the island of Cyprus, but the
greatest development of the budding
copper industry was in Egypt,
where specific historical records
show that about 10,000 tons of cop
per metal were produced in the
period from 1850-1580 B.C. Contrast
this production of 35 tons per year
with the present world production
of about 7 million tpy.
Evolution of the Copper Industry
The copper ore mined by the an
cients was high grade, and the cop
per produced was expensive. The
copper industry began with narrow
high-grade veins, but has evolved
to the point where massive earth-
moving equipment can be operated
in huge, low-grade open pits. In
dian pits dug before 3000 B.C. in
the Lake Superior district were in
ore which averaged 15% Cu. His
torical research done by Arthur
Brant has shown that copper cost
in the Middle East in 1840 B.C. in
terms of 1970 labor dollars was
about $25 per Ib. The copper mined
in northern Europe in 1540 in the
time of Georgius Agricola averaged
about 8% Cu, and the cost in 1970
labor dollars was about $10 per Ib
Average ore grade had dropped to
about CTc Cu in 1890, and the cost
of copper in the U.S. in 1970 dollars
was about 45^ per Ib. Butte, Mont.,
was a good example of the effi
ciently operated vein mines of this
time.
In 1906, Daniel Jackling made a
dramatic entrance into the copper
scene with the Bingham Canyon
open-pit copper mine and proved
that more profit was possible min
ing 2% porphyry copper ore on a
MINING ENGINEERS APRIL 1970. MINING ENGINEERING 67
large scale than had been previously
made mining 6% vein ore. By 1910,
the cost in 1970 dollars had de
creased to 31tf per Ib. Jackling was
the Henry Ford of the copper in
dustry. He reduced the pounds-per-
ton number and increased the tons-
per-day number and in so doing
reduced the cost of copper. Jack-
l
;
ng s important contribution was
simply the realization that in a very
large tonnage operation fixed unit
costs would be reduced to a mini
mum. This simple concept increased
the world s copper resources by
several hundred percent and was an
important step in the progressive
evolution which had begun in 3300
B.C.
Rising Efficiency Offsets
Declining Ore Grade
In 1945, average U.S. ore grade
had dropped to 1.3% Cu, and cost in
1970 dollars was about 26? per Ib.
Open-pit mining efficiency had im
proved, and several of the porphyry
copper deposits which had been ori
ginally developed as block-caving
operations were being converter!
into open-pit mines.
In 1970, open-pit mining has
evolved further by dint of huge
rock-moving equipment and some
automation, particularly in copper
concentrators. Now. however, the
swing away from bulk underground
mining is being reversed, since in
creasing depth of exploration is re
vealing new porphyry copper do-
posits which are too deep to strip
Block-cave mining is being tenta
tively planned for three new de
posits in Arizona, and others are
certain to be found Average U.S.
grade is 0.65% Cu. nnd cost is about
32<J per Ib.
The impact of technology has been
much less marked in the remaining
vein-type copper deposits where it
is not possible to apply bulk mining
techniques, and as a result vein-
type mines are becoming rare in
areas of high labor cost. In 1936,
over 500 underground mines, mostly
narrow-vein, were in operation in
Arizona, but in 1970 there are only
about ten in operation.
Fig. 1, in which grade of ore and
cost of copper in 1970 dollars are
plotted against time, reflects the
evolution of copper mining. The
slope of the copper price curve de
viates from the copper grade curve
in 1932 and reverses its downward
trend.
Occurrence of Copper in the Crust
The following are a series of large
numbers intended to demonstrate
that copper is a relatively abundant
element in the earth s crust: in the
first mile of depth there are ap
proximately 3 x 10" tons of copper
metal, or about 500 million times
the current annual world copper
consumption. Obviously, the rela-
232
tively concentrated portion of this
copper is only a small fraction of
the whole, constituting, say, 10
"
tons
concentrated in deposits with grades
in excess of 0.25% Cu, of which ap
proximately 4%, or 400 million tons,
have been mined to date.
Of the relatively concentrated 10
tons of copper, perhaps three billion
tons are in the form of high-grade
veins and replacements, three bil
lion tons in widespread strata-
bound and red-bed deposits, and
four billion tons in disseminated de
posits including porphyry copper,
magnetic segregation and massive
magnetite-copper deposits. The dis
seminated deposits are bulk low-
grade deposits in which deposit di
mensions are sufficiently large to
allow the application of large, highly
mechanized, highly efficient rock-
moving equipment.
Known bulk low-grade orebodies
include many porphyry coppers and
relatively few magmatic segregation
and magnetite-copper deposits
Geology of Porphyry Copper
Deposits
Porphyry copper deposits are
large, low-grade, roughly equidi-
mensional. disseminated deposits
which contain chalcopyrite, pyrite
and at least trace amounts of molyb
denite, silver, and gold, and which
sometimes contain chalcocite and
bornitc. The deposits tend to have
either a vertical-cylindrical or flat
disc shape and are hypogene. hydro-
thermal deposits alwavs related to
intrusive rocks including porphyry
rock units. Mineralization can occur
in either the host intrusive or wall
rocks.
The copper grade of primary por
phyry deposits is commonly less
than 0.4% Cu, and with a few ex
ceptions the grade is alwavs less
than O.STf Cu, but these primary-
deposits also tend to have a vertical
cylindrical shape which may have
a large vertical dimension so
that their overall tonnage is large
Exploration in the San Manuel-
Kalamazoo and Bingham Canyon
deposits has indicated that this ver
tical dimension can reach many
thousands of feet, and it is probable
that bulk underground mining will
eventually be necessary in deposits
such as Binpham Canyon and Mo-
renci. The porphyry copper deposits
in which secondary enrichment has
taken place have variable enriched
ore grades which often exceed 2%
Cu. but these orebodies generally
have a flat, blanket shape with a
vertical dimension which is seldom
over a few hundred feet. This
usually results in ore tonnage of a
lower order of magnitude than thp
tonnaee in large primary-ore-grade
deposits.
Climatic conditions and elaciation
in Canada have not favored second
ary enrichment, and most of the
porphyries discovered in British
Columbia are primary-ore-grade
deposits. A recently discovered por
phyry prospect, the Casino deposit
in the Yukon Territory, is probably
the first example of significant chal
cocite enrichment in Canada. The
primary deposits in British Colum
bia tend to be of marginal grade
under present economics, but sev
eral have potentially large tonnages.
Preliminary estimates suggest that
British Columbia could have the
greatest concentration of large-ton
nage porphyry deposits of ore grade
or potential ore grade found any
where in the world. As copper con
sumption increases and marginal ore
grade declines during the next 30
years, Canada will assume increas
ing importance as a source of copper
Consideration Regarding
Porphyry Copper Genesis
Ore deposit geologists have been
trained to believe that hypogene ore
deposits are found by correctly an
alyzing structural controls of ore
deposition, but there is reason to
believe that little or no direct con
trol of mineralization is exerted by
preore structures in many porphy
ries. The typical cylindrical orebody
shape fits very poorly with the hy
pothesis that hydrothermal fluids
migrated upward along a large-
scale fissure
In several districts, of which the
Peru-Chile mineral belt is the best
example, porphyries show a distinct
tendency to be aligned in a narrow
belt, hut no distinct, continuous
structure can be mapped between
deposits along these linear trends,
and it must be concluded that the
apparent structural control is a sec
ond-derivative effect of a deep-
seated, large-scale structure per
haps located in the lower part of
the crust. This unseen linear feature
controlled the positions of a series
of intrusive bodies which in turn.
by differentiation, may have ex
pelled bubbles of mineralizing
fluids which migrated to form cy
linders of porphyry copper mineral
ization.
Porphyry copper deposits seem to
occur as individual deposits and
clusters distributed along several
large belts. The best known of these
forms a narrow but rather con
tinuous string of porphyry occur
rences extending for at least 1500
miles north from central Chile.
Widely separated occurrences are
found along the further projection
of the belt into northern South
America and Central America. The
occurrences increase in density
along the west coast of Mexico and
finally form an oval-shaped cluster
of deposits in northern Sonora.
southern Arizona and southwestern
New Mexico. The trend can be
traced northward by occurrences in
northern Arizona, Utah, Nevada.
Idaho, Montana and Washington,
and on into British Columbia where
another roughly oval cluster occurs.
From there it projects northward
68 MINING ENGINEERING. APRIL 1970 SOCIETY OF
Sro* 0.1
. Cyl
Z04
F,v. ;
.\i-crage ^nide o\ copper nuneil and price <>/ copper in W70 dollar*,. For liter 5000 years, copper prices arul ore grades
drifted downward together, but in 1932, the price trend turned up while grades continued down. The divergence is
regarded as
permanent. Kotc that grutle i*
expected In decline to 0.25% Cn by the year 2000 A.D.
with scattered occurrences into the
Yukon Territory and Alaska. A sim
ilar but less-well-known linear
trend of porphyry copper occur
rences apparently extends along the
Pacific "ring of fire" in a south
easterly arc from the Philippine?
through New Guinea and the Solo
mon Islands. There i? probably an
other belt present in the Near East
which passes through Iran, where
recent exploration indicates another
possible cluster of porphyry occur
rences, including large copper ore-
bodies. Distribution of porphyry-
type occurrences in the USSR
suggests a belt or cluster of porphy
ries in that area also
Copper deposits of probable por
phyry copper affinity are either
known or in production in southern
Europe and Turkey. II is interesting
to note that most porphyry copper
belts occur on the western margins
of continents, a fact which may re
late to current theories regarding
continental drift and ocean-floor
spreading.
Size Makes the Big Difference
Perhaps the most distinctive dif
ference between porphyry copper
deposits and other metal deposits
is the huge size of the porphyries,
where mineralization can some
times be measured in cubic miles of
rock. Their typical dimensions more
nearly match those of a stock rather
than the dimensions of a vein or re
placement orebody. The geologist
examining a large porphyry deposit
is in the position of an ant exam
ining the surface of an elephant,
and it is often difficult for him to
see the problem in proper prospec
tive.
History of Porphyry Development
The first group of porphyry cop
per deposits were brought into pro
duction in the 1905-1915 period in
Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada.
Mexico and Chile. Most of the ore-
bodiep had been long known, but
only as geologic curiosities. What
could one do with several million
tons of 2% Cu ore in 1900? Explora
tion consisted of mapping and sam
pling, and the technique of leach cap
ping interpretation developed dur
ing this period by Augustus Locke
and Roland Blanchard and other?
proved to be particularly effective
in evaluating chalcocite blanket de
posits. Others who made significant
contributions included Daniel Jack-
ling. Ira Joralemon, Robert Gem-
mell. William Braden, J. Parkc
Channing and James Douglas. These
original porphyry copper operations
which began 60 years ago have all
remained in production.
Relatively few other porphyries
were brought in until after 1940.
when a new generation of deposits
was developed under the stimulation
of World War II and the high post
war copper consumption. These ore-
bodies were located in Arizona,
Peru and Chile, and most discoveries
resulted from careful geologic map
ping by men such as Harrison
Schmitt, Kenyon Richard, Harold
Courtright, Bill Swayne and B.S.
Butler.
In recent years porphyry copper
deposits have been put into produc
tion in Arizona, Nevada, Chile,
British Columbia and the Philip
pines. Other new deposits have been
discovered but not yet developed in
some of these areas and in Peru, the
Solomon Islands, Iran, Puerto Rico,
and Mexico. Most discoveries dur
ing this period were made by teams
of mining company exploration men,
and a list of men who have partici
pated in successful exploration
would be long. A group organized
by Kenyon Richard and Harold
Courtright has been particularly
successful in the Southwest and
South America. Excellent basic and
applied porphyry copper research
has been accomplished by groups
organized by C. H. Burgess and Paul
Bailly, and by V. D. Perry. Two non-
geologists who have contributed to
porphyry copper discoveries are Al
lan Bowman and Spud Huestis. Most
of the recent discoveries have re
sulted from geologic mapping and
offset drilling of known mineraliza
tion, and this has been aided by
geochemical and geophysical sur
veys. Discovery of the Puna orebody
was a direct result of geophysical
work.
Exploration for Porphyry Coppers
The trend since 3300 B.C. has been
toward larger, lower-grade deposits,
and there is every reason to assume
that this trend will continue for the
coming 30 years. In addition to min
ing efficiency considerations, such
deposits will tend to be exploited
not only because they can be mined
more efficiently, but also because
they will be easier to find. It will
obviously be cheaper and easier to
locate, at deep drilling depths, a
disseminated orebody with an area
of one square mile than to locate
a high-grade orebody with an area
of one-tenth square mile.
Geophysics has been a successful
tool in exploration for several types
of ore deposits, but to date its value
has been limited in the porphyry
copper search. Porphyry copper ore
MINING ENGINEERS APRIL 1970. MINING ENGINEERING 69
ZAMBIA- CONGO - CHILE U. S.
- CANADA
t-
u.
o
O
a
60
50
40
a.
UJ
o
CO
o
300
250
=>
o
UJ
o
60
50
200 40
30 150 30
20
10
100
50
20
10
V U V
Fig. - Copper cost figures for the major producing areas. After-far cost appears higlicst in the Zambia-Congo area and lou:
flic L .S. -Canadian metor. Tlie jonncr /i</\ llu loticitl n^t per man "hift,
but tlii\ adl iintagc is dis\ipntid Juj
a hi^li labor CO.
pound of copper.
area and lowest in
cost per
has some physical properties that
are sometimes detectable by elec
trical geophysical techniques whicli
were developed by Arthur Brant
and T. R. Madden and others, and
it is probable that with further re
finement these methods will becomu
an important means for prospecting
covered areas.
Geochemical prospecting tech
niques have sometimes been effec
tive, particularly in tropical area?
such as Central America and Puerto
Rico. These methods are severely
limited, however, by the fact that
copper and molybdenum will ap
parently migrate upward only a few-
feet through soil. An increasing
amount of porphyry copper explora
tion is being done in areas of postore
cover where targets are selected on
the basis of geologic projections
from outcrops or on the basis of
geophysical or geochemical ano
malies. At an earlier or a later stage
in these projects, it is usually neces
sary to drill exploration holes, and
various drilling techniques are used
depending on whether prospecting
information or precise sampling in
formation is required. A number of
drilling innovations have been bor
rowed from the petroleum indus
try in recent years. As exploration
moves into progressively deeper
cover, it becomes increasingly im
portant to decrease the cost and in
crease the speed of exploration drill
ing, and the mining industry would
be well advised to budget research
and development money to develop
better drilling equipment.
Many Deposits Await Discovery
It is, of course, not possible to
predict the total number of por
phyry copper deposits that will ul
timately be exploited in the various
districts, but a crude approximation
may be possible if one compares
the number of known deposits in
each district with the percentage of
the district in which the preore sur
face has been prospected. The area
prospected ordinarily would include
the preore outcrop plus that portion
of the area of postore cover which
has been adequately tested by drill
ing. On this basis, one could make
the following approximations as
suming present minimum mining
grades: in the Southwest area ap
proximately 30 deposits have been
found in the 30% of the total preore
surface which has been prospected,
leaving 70 deposits undiscovered. In
Chile and Peru, approximately 12
deposits have been found in the 50%
of the mineral belt which has been
prospected, leaving 12 undiscovered
deposits. In British Columbia, 13 de
posits have been found, but only 10-
15% of the preore surface has been
explored, so that 100 deposits may
remain to be found.
These figures will be affected bj
a great number of variables which
include: the assumed minimum ore
grade, incidence of orebodies in
covered versus outcrop area, the oc
currence of blind orebodies below
the preore surface, and finally the
economic-political factors in differ
ent copper-producing countries. For
example, if it were possible to mine
0.5% Cu in Chile and Peru, several
times as many deposits would prob
ably be in production and several
times as many would remain to be
found. It should be emphasized that
the mere presence of a deposit at a
depth of 5,000-10,000 ft does not
mean that it will necessarily be
come an orebody which can be
mined at a profit, first because of
the large expense of discovering it,
and second because of the costs and
engineering problems involved in
mining it. Deposits under deep cover
which can be eliminated as prospects
include half of the Southwest group,
a third of the South American de
posits and perhaps a fifth of the
western Canada group.
It is interesting to speculate that
when serious exploration of these
covered areas is underway, geolo
gists will probably find deposits
which are substantially different in
grade and profitability from those
of the last generation of new por
phyry coppers. The majority of new
mines developed since 1915 have not
70 MINING ENGINEERING, APRIL 1970 SOCIETY OF
235
really been "found," they have sim
ply "evolved" into orebodies as im
proving technology made it possible
to mine progressively lower-grade
ore, as was shown in Fig. 1. For this
reason, most of the mines brought
in at any given time have been just
a little better than marginal grade.
Most of the recent U.S. and British
Columbia deposits, for example,
have been in the 0.5% Cu range. If
a virgin deposit is discovered under
postore cover, however, it could be
a high-grade, high-profit, chalcocite
blanket in Arizona, or a Braden in
British Columbia. Original ore re
serve figures for Bingham Canyon
in 1905 were quoted at a grade of
2.2% Cu, and Miami s reserves in
1911 were 2.59% Cu. Braden has
produced very large tonnages con
taining over 1.5% primary copper.
The preore outcrops in the South
west and in parts of British Colum
bia have been so thoroughly pros
pected that now only indirect ex
ploration techniques offer much
chance of success. However, there
are still porphyry copper leached
capping outcrops in South America.
Iran, Oceania and elsewhere that
remain to be evaluated by the older
methods.
Included in Fig. 1 is a graph show
ing the average grade of copper ore
mined in the U.S. with a projection
to the year 2000. One can question
the fact that average grade will de
crease to 0.25 T, Cu by 2000, but this
grade looks reasonably good even
now with a low stripping ratio, op
timum low mining and milling costs,
and a TOc copper price.
An inverse proportion exists be
tween grade and size of porphyry
copper orebodies, and if the present
average copper ore grade were to
decrease to 0.25% Cu, the average
orebody area would approximately
double. Larger orebodies tend to
have lower stripping ratios which
tend to increase the possibility that a
given deep deposit can be mined by
open-pit methods.
Porphyries Will Predominate
Present figures suggest that most
copper production in the next 30
years will come from porphyry cop
per deposits, and that an increasing
percentage of this will be from bulk
underground mining rather than
from open pits. Consideration of
current U.S. mining costs suggests
that at a waste-to-ore stripping ra
tio of approximately 5: 1 the under
ground block-caving method be
comes competitive with open-pit
mining Expressed another way, if
0.5% Cu is marginal open-pit ore
with a 0: 1 stripping ratio, then mar
ginal block-cave grade under ideal
conditions would be about 0.6% Cu.
As world copper consumption in
creases, the impact of the develop
ment of individual new deposits de
creases. In 1920, the impact of the
yearly production of a Sierrita or
Valley Copper or Bougainville
would have been 27% of the world s
copper production, but in 1970 this
amount would be only about 3%.
Current copper consumption re
quires the discovery of the equiva
lent of 1.4 billion tons of 0.5% Cu
ore per yr.
Money for mineral exploration
tends to flow to districts where geo
logic possibilities for ore occurrence
are good, where economic condi
tions favor a large margin of profit,
and where political conditions give
maximum security for large capital
investment and stability in terms
of operating expenses and tax load.
These considerations have resulted
in the concentration of porphyry
copper exploration activity in the
southwest U.S. during the past 20
years. During the past five years,
the flow of exploration money has
tended to shift to western Canada,
which has become a comfortable
exploration environment, but this
might change again with a change
in the Canadian tax structure. Little
exploration is now in progress in
Chile in spite of the area s geologic
favorability.
U.S. Could Be Self-Sufficient
But Factors Weigh Against It
U.S. per capita copper consump
tion appears to have partly leveled
ofT, and at the same time the oppor
tunities are good for discovery of
substantial new copper deposits in
the U.S. It would appear at first
glance that there is a possibility that
the U.S. might again become a net
exporter of copper, or that the com
bination of U.S. and Canadian pro
duction would be sufficient to more
than supply U.S. and Canadian in
dustrial requirements in the remain
der of the century. This may not be
the case, however, due to two facts.
First, the U.S. dual price structure
and the U.S. Department of Com
merce balance of payments program,
together with the impotence of the
U.S. State Department and the lack
of a national mineral policy, has
given American industry no chance
to compete with the aggressive,
closely coordinated Japanese indus
try-government combination, and as
a result the new Canadian copper
production has been routed to Japan
rather than to the U.S. This reliable
copper supply originating in a
nearby stable country friendly to the
U.S. has been lost. The second fac
tor which may inhibit the develop
ment of self-sufficiency is the in
creasing tendency of the U.S. public
and Government to oppose develop
ment of mineral resources within
the United States. The U.S. Govern
ment s withdrawal of large areas
from mineral entry each year and
the threats of repressive legislation
encompassing tax rates, mining
claims, environmental controls and
groundwater all reflect an increas
ingly unfriendly environment for
exploration in the U.S.
The World s Large Copper
Districts
The large copper provinces of the
world in past years have been the
U.S., Chile, Zambia and the Congo.
But with changes of ore grade, tech
nology and labor costs, and with
rising nationalism in underdeveloped
countries, the large copper provinces
of the next 30 years will include,
in addition to the foregoing nations,
Canada, Peru, Iran and the Oceania
belt, including the Philippines, New
Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Zambia and the Congo can be
lumped together for purposes of this
review in terms of their relatively
high-grade but narrow orebodies
and relatively large amount of min
ing labor per ton of ore, and sim
ilarly from the standpoint of their
underdeveloped national status and
relatively unstable and strongly na
tionalistic governments. At the pres
ent time, rising production costs and
increasing tax loads have raised the
average cost of copper from these
areas considerably above that of
U.S. or Canadian copper.
Peru and Chile can be considered
together in spite of their rather dis
similar histories and national char
acteristics. Both countries have rela
tively underdeveloped economies,
relatively high-grade, porphyry cop
per type ore, and semistable govern
ments. Peru, at least until recently,
has honored its commitments to
foreign companies, while Chile has
not. The present taxation policy for
foreign mining companies in Chile
and Chile s policy for regulation of
export copper prices are a repeti
tion of a series of actions taken by
the Chilean Government prior to
World War I actions which even
tually contributed to the death of the
Chilean nitrate industry.
The U.S. and Canada can also be
considered as a unit. On the basis
of past copper production, the U.S.
is far ahead of Canada, but on the
basis of potential copper ore reserves
this may not be true. Both countries
share the characteristics of high la
bor cost, high labor productivity,
low-grade ore, and stable govern
ments. The Canadian Government,
however, has shown a much stronger
inclination to support its domestic
mining industry than has the U.S.
Government.
The characteristics of the different
copper-producing areas are tabu
lated in Fig. 2 in an effort to com
pare the cost of producing copper
from each area. Fig. 2 shows for
each principal copper-producing
area the following factors: pounds
of copper recovered per ton of ore,
tons of rock per man-shift in the
mining department, total cost per
pound of copper, total direct cost
and tax load. You will note that the
apparent cost after taxes of produc
ing copper is highest in Zambia-
Congo and lowest in U.S.-Canada.
Cost per man-shift, incidentally, is
Fig. 3 Graph showing the annual num
ber o/ pounds o/ copper consumed per
capita with projections (dashed lints) to
the year 20(1(1. li\ each case, two projec
tion , arc fWfH ntrd n conservative CMC
which .tli oil s MO ri.vi in VS. consumption
unit only a moderate increase in ti orlil
fonsnmptiim, initl u I SHA/ projection
showing n sleep rise in both. At present,
the more conservative estimates appear to
he more likelij.
U.S. Consumption, since
the boom before and after World War II,
lias shown a tendency to level off, and
world consumption, held down bij
e\-
plotling population and slow economic
growth, lias risen far less rapidly than
optimists predicted ten years ago.
lowest in Zambia-Congo, but the
resulting labor cost per pound of
copper is several times that of U.S.
Canada. Cost before taxes is prob
ably similar in Peru-Chile and U.S.
Canada.
Keep in mind that some mining
operations and governments such as
Chile (which derives 60% of its
foreign exchange from copper) are
vulnerable in times of decreasing
demand and decreasing copper price
The vulnerable groups are those
with high direct or total copper cost?
after taxes. For example if the cost
of copper produced by U.S. mine?
became higher than the world cop
per price, the U.S. mines would shut
down. If, on the other hand, the
Chilean total copper costs became
substantially higher than the world
copper price, would, or could, the
government give up its heavy tax
load on copper production? Since
Chile produces about 13% of the
world s copper, and Chile and Zam
bia together about 26%, it appears
236
that these governments are in a po
sition to control the world copper
price, and it appears that they can
not afford to let the price decline.
The formation of the Inter-Govern
mental Council of Copper-Export
ing Countries (Chile, Congo, Peru
and Zambia) is certainly an effort
intended to keep the copper price-
high.
Consumption and Price
Fig. 3 is a chart showing per cap
ita consumption of copper in the
U.S. and the world equated against
time. The left portion of the U.S.
curve reflects the explosive expan
sion of technology in the U.S. pre
ceding and following World War II
which resulted in a greatly ex
panded consumption of copper per
capita, but this consumption per
capita has since shown some ten
dency to level off, so U.S. per capita
consumption is projected as a level
line. Various USBM projections
have been made, but higher recent
projections assuming a 5.8% growth
rate suggest that per capita con
sumption may climb in a steep
curve and reach approximately 42
Ib by the year 2000.
The curve for per capita consump
tion of copper in the world shows
copper consumption increasing in a
rather steady gradient in recent
years. Higher USBM projections as
sume that this curve will also
steepen, but here, also, the author
prefers the more conservative1
straight-line interpretation. Eco
nomic development in Latin Amer
ica, Asia and Africa has taken place
far more slowly than was antici
pated ten years ago. Exploding pop
ulation tends to stifle rate of eco
nomic development.
Much has been written recently
about the accelerated advance of
technology. It is frequently noted
that the sum of human knowledge
is doubling every ten years, and
that 90% of all scientists who have
ever lived are alive today. It is pre
dicted that the per capita consump
tion of goods and services in ad
vanced countries in the year 2000
will be four times present consump
tion.
Population Stunts Growth
On the other side of the coin is
world population also increasing in
an exponential curve which has in
some respects already outstripped
the ability of the world to provide
food. Limits on some commodities,
and on water and even on air, are
in sight. Something will have to
give, and many authorities predict
that the population growth curve
must soon flatten, if from no other
cause, from mass starvation.
Population growth has been more
rapid than was anticipated ten years
ago; if this trend continues for 30
years, world population could be as
high as 7.5 billion people including
I
1
,
I
I
15 I-
1
ig. 4 Tula/ l- .S. and world consump
tion of newly mined copper in millions of
tons. As in Fig. J, there are two projec
tion-, In tin year 2IIIXI. I lie lower or
straight line projections are bused on past
trends in
consumption and population
growth. The higher L SBM projections
rise to a copper consumption of 6 /i
times the present figure. These represent
an outside estimate in which it is as
sumed not only that the world popula
tion will grow, but also that it will enjoy
n easily higher standard of living buoyed
up by a phenomenal technological capa
bility. F.ien the more conservative pro
jections to 2V4 times present consump
tion prestige a challenging 30 years for
the copper industry.
6 billion in underdeveloped nations.
This would be about double present
world population.
Fig. 4 shows U.S. and world con
sumption of newly mined copper.
It includes a curve based on the
USBM higher projected increase to
about 6% times 1970 consumption
by the year 2000, and also an inter
pretation based on the previous pei
capita consumption curve and popu
lation increase which still indicates
an increase to 2V4 times the 1970
figure. The higher projection should
be considered as a tentative upper
limit toward which consumption
could climb if non-U.S. population
is able to greatly increase its stan
dard of living, if greatly increased
substitution for copper uses does not
take place, and if copper is found to
be available in almost unlimited
quantities in deposits of reasonably
high grade. To put these figures into
72 MINING ENGINEERING, APRIL 1970 SOCIETY OF
237
better prespective, assume that ad
ditional copper production will come
from the present copper-producing
districts. Then an increase to 6Vz
times present copper production
would require 104 major copper
mines in Arizona. It is difficult to
visualize where the professional
talent would be found to handle the
exploration, the mine development
and the mine operations for this
scale of enlargement of the industry,
or even, for that matter, for an in
dustry 2Vi times the size of the
present one.
An Age-Old Trend is Reversed
A projection of copper prices to
the year 2000 in terms of 1970 US
dollars is shown in Fig. 1. A price
of $1.05 per lb in 2000 is suggested
by the chart, but the price will be
much higher with a large increase
in consumption. It appear? almost
certain that the long-range copper
price must
progressively increase as
relatively high-grade and relatively
near-surface deposit? are worked
This mciease. which reflects an
increase in capita] investment and
energy consumption per unit of
metal output, will be a reversal of
the trend which began in 3300 B C
and continued to 1932. as shown in
fig 1, and it will be a permanent
reversal. Ira Joralemon has pointed
out that one of the largest f;iotors
contributing to higher copper cost
is the increasinp cost of building
copper production capacity. In 50
years the price of copper (not con
sidering inflation) has increased by
3 ,2 times, but the cost of building
a plant to produce a unit amount oi
copper has increased by over !*>
times.
Copper Can Survive Substitutes
Substitution of other materials foi
copper is a real factor in the coppei
market, ll is not a new problem
however, as witness L. C Graton s
comments in 1926: "When aluminum
began to be produced on a commer
cial scale in the early nineties it
was thought that it might make
serious inroads into copper con
sumption. .
. About 1909 some of
the largest copper companies were
spurred to take up. through thcii
research departments, investigation
of aluminum competition."
Neither is substitution necessarily
a sinister problem. In a speech given
in 1965. James Boyd said "... I for
one fail to be frightened by threat of
substitution. I can only say. thank
God for aluminum or other substi
tutes, for we as an industry could
not possibly have met the explosive
demands of modern society unless
some substitutes had come along
to help us."
And finally, substitution is not
necessarily an irreversible process
when one considers that 9 kw-hr
of electrical energy are required to
MINING ENGINEERS
produce 1 lb of aluminum. The
world supply of hydroelectric power
and fossil fuel has definite limits,
and world consumption of electricity
is
increasing at a much faster rate
than consumption of copper and alu
minum. A recent Federal Power
Commission report estimates that
U.S. electric power consumption will
increase by 12 times in the period
from 1960 to 1990.
The Copper Market
Copper has traditionally been a
strongly cyclic commodity subject
to violent upward and downward
fluctuations of price and consump
tion. This market uncertainty has
to a large extent been caused by the
fact that copper resources have been
divided among several geographical
areas and several national groups
among which there has been rela
tively little cooperation and coordi
nation. The copper industry has of
ten allowed market regulation to be
brought about by the wasteful
means of strikes, and the industry
has traditionally been quick to cut
prices and, prior to 1957, slow to
curtail production to stabilize the
copper price.
The function of government in the
copper business has been of uncer
tain value. The U.S. stockpile, in
addition to serving as a strategic
copper source in wartime, would be
a potential stabilizing factor in the
copper market if copper were
bought during periods of oversup-
ply and sold during periods of
shortage, and if the government
were required to do this by the
stockpile law. A study of the copper
stockpile history by N. N. Reddy
indicates that government buying
probably has tended to stabilize the
copper market to some extent. Un
certainty regarding government
stockpile policy has sometimes in
the past tended to make the stock
pile ;i sword hanging over the mar
ket during times of price weakness,
but this effect is minimized at pres
ent because of the comparatively
low quantity of copper in the stock
pile.
Price Variations Continue
The Presidential price guidelines
of the past five years have been
partly responsible for the existence
of the weird phenomenon of a dual
copper price, with the London price
sometimes 100% above the U.S. pro
ducer s price (Fig. 1). For some
time a substantial percentage of U.S.
production has been marketed at
a price greater than the producer s
price, particularly in the integrated
operations. This suggests that the
bulk of the copper market, even in
the U.S., is now pretty thoroughly
conditioned to a 50? copper price
Hopefully the dual price structure
may soon be discarded. The actions
of the governments of Chile and
Zambia in the copper market have
been, and will be, directed towards
holding the price of copper at high
levels. This, to a large extent, is
exactly what the U.S. Presidential
policy has been intended to prevent.
As pointed out earlier, first, Chile
and Zambia may be in a position to
control the world copper price and,
second, copper revenue constitutes
such a large percentage of the na
tional income of both countries that
it is difficult to see how these coun
tries can afford to allow the price
to drop, particularly since they seem
to be in a poor position to compete
during times of low copper price.
On the other hand, it seems doubtful
that they would be capable of the
self-discipline necessary to volun
tarily limit production in periods
of oversupply or voluntarily limit
price to prevent substitution in
periods of shortage. This attitude
will tend to maintain a profit mar
gin for the U.S. and Canadian cop
per mines during periods of low
world copper price.
Conclusion
What conclusions, then, can be
drawn from this review? The fu
ture of the copper industry in the
rest of the 1900 s appears generally
bright, but probably hectic. Con
sumption will increase by several
times, with this increase limited only
by the supply of relatively cheap
copper. The copper price in 1970
dollars will probably at least double,
and the average grade of ore mined
in North America will decrease to
less than half of present grade. Sub
stitution for copper will increase,
but this development will also pro
vide elasticity to the market in
periodic times of shortage.
Porphyry copper deposits will
provide the bulk of copper produc
tion during the next 30 years, and
many deep porphyry discoveries
will be made in covered areas which
will require bull: underground min
ing. This will stimulate develop
ment of more effective mechaniza
tion of underground mining, par
ticularly in the U.S., where a serious
shortage of underground miners and
mining engineers has already de
veloped. Economic and political con
siderations, as well as geologic fac
tors, will tend to shift copper ex
ploration and mining away from
some of the traditional copper dis
tricts of the world. Western Canada.
Oceania and Iran will emerge as
major copper sources.
The copper industry will be buf
feted by stronger pressures and
more rapid change than it has ever
experienced. It will be asked to in
crease production by many times.
but will lack space in which to op
erate. It will be attacked alike by-
nationalistic governments and do
mestic conservationists, but unpre
cedented opportunities will also
open to the industry. The keynote
to the next 30 years for copper will
be challenge! n=
238
LOWELL, J. DAVID
Office:
HomeOffice:
6054 N. Oracle,
Tucson, AZ 85704
(520) 797-2863
Fax: (520)797-6515
E-mail: lowmincx (frdakotacom.nci
789 Av. Beatrix,
Rio Rico, AZ 85648
Born: February 28, 1928, Nogales, AZ
1949
1957
1959
1998
BS, Mining Engineering, University oi Arizona
MS, Geology, Stanford University
Eng. Geol., University of Arizona
Doctor honor causa, University Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru
Lowell Mineral Exploration LLC, Arizona. Manager
Lowell Mineral Exploration Ltda., Chile, Manager
Exploraciones Mineras Lowell S.A. de C.V., Mexico, Manager
1 961 -date Consulting Geologist, 100 U.S. and foreign mining and engineering
companies and governments. Managed contract exploration projects which
discovered Kalamazoo and Casa Grande West orebodies in the U.S. and La
Escondida orebody in Chile
1959-1961 Utah Construction Co., San Francisco, CA, Sr. Geologist to District Geologist
1955-1959 Southwest Ventures (subsidiary of Ventures Ltd., Canada). Tucson, AZ.
Chief Geologist
1 951 -1 954 USAEC, Grand Junction, CO, Geologist to District Geologist
1949-1951 ASARCO, Santa Eulalia, Mexico, Engineer to Mine Foreman
Member: MMSA; AIME; SEG; Arizona Geological Society; Inst. de Ingenieros de Minas
de Chile; Registered Geologist and Registered Mining Engineer, AZ
Awards: 1970 AIME Daniel Jackling Award; 1972 Distinguished Citizen Award,
University of AZ; 1974 Distinguished Lecturer CIM; 1975-1980 Assoc. Editor,
Economic Geology; 1977 Thayer Lindsley Distinguished Lecturer SEG; 1983
Society of Economic Geologists Silver Medal
MMSA 10/98
239
Twelfth Annual American Mining Hall
of Fame Awards Presentation, December
3, 1994, sponsored by Mining
Foundation of the Southwest, Tucson,
AZ.
AMERICAN MINING
HALL OF FAME
1994 MEDAL OF MERIT RECIPIENT
J. DAVID LOWELL
fl avc Lowell was born on a ranch in Southern
Ari/ona in 1928. He graduated from the Uni-
versity of Ari/ona, B.S. Mining Knginecring,
1949, Stanford I mversity, M.S. Geology, 1937,
and uas au aided the University of Ari/ona s Pro
fessional Engineer of Geology in 1959.
He has worked with ASARCO Inc.,
USAHC, Ventures Ltd., and Utah Construction as
mine eniiineei . foreman, small mine manager, ge
ologist, district geologist and chief geologist. Since 19M he has been a
private
consultant v\orking for more than |(K) companies and governments and managed
projects
that disco\ered a number of major deposits, including Kalama/oo and
Casa Grande \\ est in Ari/ona and La Lscondida, /aldivar and San Cristob.il in
Chile. He is
presently conducting mineral exploration in Peru, funded by Arequipa
Resources and is associated \\ith Tucson s Mineral Advisor,- (iroup. Dave s insight
into porphyry copper gcologv has been universally recogni/ed as having revolu
tionized mineral exploration practices.
Da\e has received AlML s tackling Award, Society of Lconomic Gcologv
Silver Medal, i he Univci.sit v olAri/ona s Distinguished Citi/cn A\\ard, \\.is ( \\\\\
Distinguished Lecturer, and SLG s I
hayer Lindsley Lecturer.
240
PALABRAS DEL
SENOR JAMES DAVID LOWELL
EN LA CEREMONIA DE SU DOCTORADO HONORIS
CAUSA FOR LA UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL MAYOR DE
SAN MARCOS
LIMA, 14 DE AGOSTO DE 1998
. i".
by tde A\%J <J Air n rtj Cliey_-irnr tiii.vdie
241
GRACIAS DOCTOR MANUEL PAREDES MANRIQUE,
RECTOR DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE SAN MARCO^
MIEMBROS DISTINGUIDOS DE LA FACULTAD^ ALUMNOS;
Y AMIGOS.
Me siento muy honrado y aprecio mucho el honor que se me
ha conferido el dia de hoy. Para mi recibir este titulo de la
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos que es la mas
antigua del Nuevo Mundo con su ilustre historia que se
extiende a lo largo de mas de 400 anos, lo hace aun mayor.
Me gustaria tambien expresar mi gratitud al Ingeniero
Teodoro Garcia Blasquez L Y a Juan Soza Benitez y
V
Esteban Garcia Corrales e Ingeniero Fernando G. Perales
Calderon quienes han dedicado generosamente su tiempo y
energia en planificar y supervisar la construccion de nuevos
edificios en la escuela de minas, venciendo muchas
dificultades imprevistas* me gustaria tambien agradecer a
todos los profesores y administradores de la escuela
academica y profesional de Ingenieros de Minas de la
facultad de Geologia, Minas y Metalurgia y Ciencias
Geograficas.
fit"
L)y u it- .-.^\u u . . .. 1 1 ii
3 \^i .e/cn ic- u.u.oi c
242
Esta bello edificio de la Universidad National Mayor de
San Marcos es un ejemplo de la arquitectura entre los
edificios mas antiguos de Lima, que da la sensation de uno
estar viendo la evidencia de uno de los centres mas
importantes de poder en el mundo en la epoca en que los
virreyes de Espana gobemaban gran parte de Sudamerica
desde esta ciudad.
Mis vinculos con el Peru podria decirse que se extiende
a tiempos antes de que yo naciera. Mi padre trabajo como
ingeniero de Minas en la Mina Santo Domingo que se
encuentra en el flanco oriental de la Cordillera de Los Andes,
desde 1919 a 1922 y mi hermana nacio en la Ciudad del
Cuzco. Mi madre viajaba de la Mina al Cuzco en mula, mi
hermana se siente muy orgullosa de tener doble nacionalidad
y ha vuelto a visitar Cuzco hace algunos anos.^
La industria minera y la profesion de Minas se
caracterizan por ser muy internacionales. He trabajado en
26 paises distintos y tengo amigos mineros en la mayoria de
ellos y a menudo no soy capaz de recordar cuales son sus
nacionalidades, y esto se debe a que ellos tambien, se han
trasladado de pais en pais, y son realmente ciudadanos del
.en"
by the Awj iJ <A/<rn
ng Che /erne Bitware
243
mundo. Usualmente ellos tienen una opinion mucho mas
sofisticada y equilibrada de las politicas internacionales que
los periodistas o los diplomaticos profesionales, debido a que
ellos han trabajado o vivido y efectuado negocios con
4 j
personas de diferentes nacionalidades en diferentes partes
del mundo. Uno de esos mineros internacionales y viejo
amigo mio esta aqui hoy dia. Alberto Manrique nacio en Lima
y fue mi companero de estudios en la Escuela de Graduados
en la Universidad de Stanford. Desde que el termino su
educacion al igual que yo, ha trabajado en diferentes paises .
El ha ganado un gran prestigio basado en su distinguida
carrera profesional y esta nuevamente viviendo en Lima.
Desde el punto de vista de un explorador minero, Pern
es ahora una de las areas mas atractivas del mundo para
encontrar y desarrollar una nueva mina. Los yacimientos
mineros tienden a concentrarse en fajas metalogenicas las
cuales estan probablemente relacionadas a fracturas de gran
escala continental de emplazamiento profundo en la corteza
terrestre. En Sudamerica una franja como la descrita empieza
en el Sur de Chile y se extiende al Norte, paralelo al borde del
continente ;
hasta Arica. Entonces ambos, el borde del
continente y la franja metalogenica, doblan al noroeste y
244
desde alii se extiende a lo largo del Peru llegando a ser mas
debil en Ecuador. El segmento chileno pasa en parte a
Argentina y Bolivia^ pero los depositos mas importantes,
incluyendo la mayoria de los depositos mas grandes de
Cobre en el mundo estan en Chile y Peru. La franja se
desarrolla gradualmente hacia el Norte, y en el Norte del Peru
en los ultimos anos se han encontrado varies depositos
epitermales de oro junto con yacimientos de cobre
diseminado previamente conocidos y depositos
polimetalicos.
Un punto importante en relacion al Peru es el hecho que
1C)
hubo un "hiatus" de mas de 2G- anos :
durante el periodo
socialists cuanoo muy poca exploracion se hizo y no habia
fondos disponibles para aplicar algunas de las tecnicas mas
modernas Y el hecho que gran parte de la superficie de la
franja metalogenica esta cubierta por gravas y formaciones
volcanicas recientes, aumenta en gran parte las
cportunidades de futures descubrimientos de yacimientos
cubiertos. La densidad de yacimientos conocidos en
afloramientos de rocas pre-minerales en Peru esta entre los
mas altos del mundo, y estoy seguro que hay muchos mas
6
. _- 1 . ~, L>
j
1 1 1
e ,*. A d i v M 1 1 1 1
3 v_- 1 . c f e i ic iji . t w^t c
245
depositos importantes cubiertos bajo las superficies de las
gravas y rocas volcanicas.
Es muy interesante para mi hacer notar que L,
importancia economica a nivel mundial del Peru ha figurado
repetidamente en la historia del mundo. Es bien sabido que
la production peruana de oro y plata sustento la economia
del imperio espanol en el siglo 16, y durante el siglo 20 se
logro production a niveles mundiales de metales basicos.
Recientemente la production de oro epitermal y de cobre tipo
porfidico han puesto al pais a la cabeza de la production de
cobre y oro. Lo que es menos conocido es que 1.500 anos
atras la tecnologia metalurgica peruana era en muchos
aspectos mas avanzada que otras en el mundo. La cultura
preincaica habia desarrollado una tecnologia para usar
fundentes en tratamientos de fundicion de sulfuros y habia
desarrollado la tecnica para unir metalurgicamente capas de
diferentes metales.
Una parte del aspecto international de la mineria es la
transferencia tecnologica. Hace unas pocas generaciones
atras, la tecnologia era transferida de paises "avanzados" a
paises en "desarrollo". Estas distinciones estan
246
desapareciendo. Sesenta anos atras se consideraba que las
tecnologias mas avanzadas estaban en Europa del Norte y
Norteamerica y que habia un traspaso de tecnologia, por
ejemplo, desde los Estados Unidos a Chile. Ahora nuevos
centres de desarrollo tecnologico han emergido en Corea del
Sur, Japon, Taiwan y Singapur. Rusia sobrepaso por un
tiempo en tecnologia espacial a nivel mundial. Chile
probablemente esta exportando ahora mas tecnologia de la
que importa, como es el caso en Brasil. El mundo esta
cambiando muy rapidamente y las naciones que estan
teniendo exito son aquellas que tienen gobiemos estables, un
buen sistema de educacion, filosofia de libre
empresa^
objetivos agresivos bien definidos^y una planificacion futura.
;
En el exito probablemente el optimismo es mas importante
que cualquier otra cosa.
Yo he hecho una pequena contribution en transferencia
de educacion internacional. En Chile di un curso corto en la
Universidad de Chile y dicte conferencias en universidades
como tambien fui coautor de charlas academicas en geologia
y articulos con Carlos Ruiz Fuller, Director Fundador del
Institute de Investigaciones Geologicas.
8
247
Todas estas cosas son utiles, pero ademas yo creo que
los logros reales provienen de dos factores: Trabajos para
profesionales en organizaciones extranjeras y tftulos
academicos en universidades extranjeras. Mis titulos
universitarios los obtuve en las Universidades de Arizona y
Stanford. En el grupo de hoy hay distinguidos peruanos
titulados en ambas instituciones; el Ingeniero Oswaldo Ortiz,
Director Escuela de Minas, U.N.M.S.M. como yo es graduado
del Colegio de Minas de la Universidad de Arizona. El
Ingeniero Alberto Manrique, despues de completar su
education de pre-grado en Peru obtuvo un titulo en la
Universidad de Stanford.
La rata de aumento en ciencia y tecnologia esta
creciendo en progresion geometrica con la suma del
conocimiento humano que se duplica cada vez en aun mas
cortos intervales. La rapidez y facilidad de transferencia de
informacion tambien esta aumentando rapidamente y el
sistema de Internet muchas veces permite una transferencia
casi instantanea. Esta explosion de informacion ha resultado
en una ampliation del espacio , entre personas
moderadamente bien educadas y personas muy bien
educadas. Esta diferencia esta representada por sueldos,
248
standard de vida, status y poder. Esta situacion crea un
problema enorme para las escuelas y los educadores del
mundo, cuyo objetivo es producir una sociedad educada,
homogenea y no una polarizada dirigida por una minorja
de
elite.
Yo soy un miembro del Comite Concejal del
Departamento de Geociencias de la Universidad de Arizona.
En nuestra ultima reunion discutimos un proyecto para ofrecer
nuevos tftulos de Maestrfa, los cuales en parte seran un paso
hacia la creation de una Universidad virtual. Los estudiantes
volverian a la Universidad para hacer parte de su trabajo perc
mucho se podria hacer fuera de una clase formal usando
CD ROOMS que contienen las clases dictadas y quizas
>
algunas de estas clases podrian ser introducidas a traves de
sistema Internet La Education de este tipo se puede impartir
a estudiantes del otro lado del mundo y sin limites
internacionales, usando el acceso a las mejores bibliotecas
del mundo a traves de Internet. Una parte del proceso
requiere del uso de un lenguaje intemacional. Este parece
ser el ingles y el conocimiento del ingles esta aumentando.
llegando hacer muy importante.
249
La otra cara del problema esta en la organizacion politica
mundial. Mientras la tecnologia ha avanzado a una velocidad
trascendental, la organizacion politica ha avanzado en una
atroz lentitud. Es dificil reconocer que haya mucho ava:.
real en la politica durante los ultimos 200 anos. Yo creo que
nuestro deber ,
como Ifderes y educadores es tratar de
promover en la gente joven del mundo de hoy el espiritu de
curiosidad, innovacion, flexibilidad, aventura y
descubrirniento!
Para mi ha sido una muy buena suerte el haber tenido
una oportunidad de contribuir de una manera modesta con F 1
desarrollo de la Escuela de Minas, y devolver a Peru una
pequena retnbucion de mis logros en el exito de Arequipa
Resources. He conocido muchos de los estudiantes actuates
y los he encontrado ansiosos de mentalidad abierta, gente
/
joven aplicada que esta progresando con metodos modestos.
A mi me parece que hay un gran efecto multiplicador entrc !:
que se esta haciendo hoy en la Escuela de Minas, cuando
ustedes consideren la cantidad de vidas y carreras que seran
positivamente beneficiadas en los estudiantes de hoy, y de
los que vendran en el futuro. El efecto multiplicador a futuro
es enorme para el Peru.
11
250
Thank you Dr. Manuel Paredes Manrique, Rector de la Universad de San Marcos,
Miembros distinguidos de la facultad, y alumnos Amigos.
I am very honored and very appreciative of the honor which has been conferred on
me today. For me, receiving this degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San
Marcos, the oldest University in the New World with its illustrious history spanning more
than four hundred years makes it a much greater honor still. I would also like to express
my gratitude to Ing. Teodoro Garcia-Blasques L. and to Juan Sosa Benites and Esteban
Garcia Corrales and Ing. Fernando G. Perales Calderon who have devoted selflessly of
their time and energy to plan and supervise the construction of the new buildings in the
Escuela de Minas against difficult odds. I would also like to thank all of the other
/ <-
professors and administrators of La Escuela AcKademicp Profesional de Ingenierta de
Minas de la Facultad de Geologia Minas Metalurgia y Ciencias Geograficas.
This beautiful Univ. Nac. Mayor de San Marcos building is an example of the
architecture in the older buildings in Lima which give a sense that you are seeing
evidence of one of the important centers of power of the world from the time when the
Viceroy of Spain ruled much of South America from this city. One gets the same feeling
in Madrid and Toledo and London.
My association with Peru is of long standing and could be said to extend to a time
before I was bom. My father worked as a mining engineer at the Santo Domingo mine on
the East slope of the Cordillera from 1919 to 1922 and my sister was born in the town of
Cuzco. My mother rode from the mine to Cuzco by mule. My sister has been very proud
to have dual citizenship and returned to see Cuzco a few years ago.
251
The mining industry and the mining profession are very international in character.
I have worked in 26 different countries and I have mining friends from most of these
countries and I am often unable to remember what their citizenship is because they, too,
have moved from country to country, and they are really citizens of the world and usually
have a much more sophisticated and balanced opinion of international politics than the
newspaper reporters, or even profession diplomats, because we have worked with, and
lived with, and done business with people of different nations and different parts of the
world. One of these mining internationalists, and an old friend, is here today. Alberto
Manrique was born in Lima and 1 met him as a classmate in Graduate School at Stanford
University. Since completing his education he like me, has worked in many different
countries. He enjoys a great deal of prestige on the basis of his distinguished professional
career and is again living in Lima.
Seven years ago when I formed Acuarios Minera and Arequipa Resources to do
mineral exploration in Peru I considered several different questions:
1) Would the Peruvian post-socialist society be open to foreign investment on
terms fair to both sides and would the regulations and peace and order
situation permit exploration to be carried out?
2) Would there be available trained and experienced professionals and
technicians to carry out my program?
3) Was there good expectation of finding large new undiscovered ore deposits?,
and
252
4) If found was there infrastructure and mining tradition and experience and
trained personnel to transform a new orebody into a large, efficient, mining
complex? This question revolves around people: miners, equipment
operators, technicians, chemists, engineers, metallurgists, geologists,
accountants, lawyers and business managers.
The answer to all of these four questions was yes, and I launched my Arequipa
Resources Program which was successful four years later when the Pierina gold mine was
found.
Pierina is being developed as a large open pit mine which will be in production by
December of this year.
From the viewpoint of a mineral explorationist Peru is now one of the most
attractive areas in the world to find and develop a new mine. Ore deposits tend to be
concentrated in metallogenic belts which are probably related to large continental scale
deep seated fractures in the Earth s crust. In South America such a belt begins in
southern Chile and extends almost due north parallel to the border of the continent, to
Arica. There both the border of the continent and the metallogenic belt turn northwest
and the belt then extends the length of Peru becoming weaker in Ecuador. The segment
in Chile laps into Argentina and Bolivia, but the large bulk of important ore deposits
including most of the largest copper deposits in the world, are in Chile and Peru. The
f*
/
"
belt evolves northward along iys length, and in northern Peru in recent years important
epithermal gold deposits have been found together with previously known disseminated
copper and polymetallic deposits.
253
An important consideration regarding Peru is the fact that there was an
exploration "hiatus" for more than 20 years during the socialist period when little
exploration was done and funds were not available to apply some of the modem
techniques. This fact, and the fact that much of the metallogenic belt is masked by
surface gravels and recent volcanic formations, greatly increases the opportunities for
future discoveries of concealed deposits. The density of known ore deposits in outcrops
of premineral rock in Peru is among the highest in the world, and I am certain that there
are many important deposits concealed under surface gravels and volcanic rocks.
It is very interesting to me that the global importance of Peru has emerged
repeatedly in World history. It is well known that Peruvian gold and silver production
underpinned the Spanish empire in the 16
th
Century, and world class base metal
production was achieved in the twentieth century, and porphyry copper and epithermal
gold production has more recently put the country in the forefront of world production of
copper and gold. What is less well known is that 1500 years ago Peruvian metallurgical
technology was in many respects more advanced than in any other part of the world. The
Pre Inca culture had developed a technology to use flux materials to smelt sulfide ore and
had developed the technique for metallurgically welding layers of different metals
together.
A part of the international aspect of mining is "technology transfer". A few
generations ago technology was transferred from "advanced countries" to "developing
countries". These distinctions are now becoming blurred. Sixty years ago the most
advanced technology was considered to be in Northern Europe and North America and
there was a flow of technology, for example from the US to Chile. Now new technology
254
development centers have sprung up in places like South Korea, and Japan, Taiwan and
Singapore. Russia surpassed the world for awhile in space technology. Chile is probably
now exporting more technology than it is importing, as is Brazil. The world is changing
very rapidly and the nations which are succeeding are those which have stable
governments, a good system of education, a free enterprise philosophy, and aggressive,
clear cut, future planning, and objectives. Optimism that success is possible is probably
more important than anything else.
I have made a small contribution to international cross-pollinization of education
in Chile. I
taught a short course in the University of Chile and gave lectures in Chilean
universities and was co-author of achaedemic geology talks and articles in the U.S. and
Australia as well as in Chile with Carlos Ruiz Fuller, former director of the Institute de
Investigaciones Geologicos.
All of these things are helpful, but I feel that the real advances come from two
things: jobs for professionals in foreign organizations and graduate degrees in foreign
universities. My university degrees are from the University of Arizona and from Stanford
University. In the group today are distinguished Peruvian graduates of both institutions.
Ing. Oswaldo Ortiz, Director, Escuela de Minas, U.N.M.S.M. like me is a graduate of the
College of Mines of the University of Arizona. Ing. Alberto Manrique after completing
his undergraduate education in Peru obtained a graduate degree at Stanford University.
The rate of increase in science and technology is growing in a geometric
progression with the sum of human knowledge doubling in ever shorter intervals. The
most recent doubling was in less than ten years. The speed and ease of transfer of
information is also increasing rapidly and the Internet sometimes allows almost instant
255
transfer. This explosion of information has resulted in a widening of the gap between
moderately well educated and very well educated people. This gap is represented by
salaries and standard of living, and status, and power. This situation creates an enormous
problem for the schools and the educators of the world whose objective is to produce a
more homogeneous, educated society, not a polarized one directed by an elite minority.
I am a member of the Department of Geosciences Advisory Committee of the
University of Arizona. In our last meeting we discussed a plan for offering a new masters
degree program which in part will be a step towards the creation of a virtual university.
The students would return to the university for part of their work, but much would be
done away from the formal class rooms using CD ROMS containing class lectures and
perhaps some classes would even be held on the Internet. Education of this sort can occur
with students on the other side of the world and across international boundaries while
using Internet access to the best libraries in the world. A part of this process requires use
of an international language. This happens to be English, and knowing English is
increasingly becoming more critical.
The other side of the problem is the world political organization. While
technology has advanced at an ever excelling rate, political development has advanced at
an excruciatingly slow pace. It s hard to recognize much real advance in the last 200
years, and a cynic might say that the dominant motives of politicians are greed, sloth, and
conservatism, whether they represent the political right or the left. I believe it our duty as
leaders and as educators to try to foster in the young people of the world today the spirit
of curiosity, innovation, flexibility, adventure, and discovery !
256
For me it is has been very good luck to have an opportunity to help in a small way
with the development of the Escuela de Minas, and to return to Peru a small part of my
reward from the success of Arequipa Resources. I have met many of the current students
and find them eager, open faced, industrious young people who are making do with
modest resources. It seems to me that there is a tremendous compounding effect possible
on what is being put into the Escuela de Minas now when you consider how many lives
and careers will be affected in the current student body and in classes which will attend
the school in the future. The compounded future benefit to Peru is enormous.
J. David Lowell
After lucking
out with
one of the
biggest gold
finds in
North America,
Barrick s Peter Munk decided
to play it safe. But he soon
discovered that investors hated
the slow, steady approach.
Will betting billions once again
make Munk the life of the party?
BY DONALD RUMBALL
3.1
CANADIAN BUSINESS OCTOBER 1996
r
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EARLY
ON THE MORNING
ofJuly 1 1 , two executives
from Darrick Gold Corp. of
Toronto, the third-largest
gold mining company in the world,
asked to meet David Lowell and
Catherine McLeod, the chairman and
president of an infant Vancouver-based
gold and copper mining company
called Arequipa Resources Ltd. They
were turned down. When Barnck s
men insisted, Lowell and McLeod
agreed to squeeze them into a 20-
minute gap between a breakfast meet
ing and a 9 a.m. presentation. In a
cranny of the King Edward Hotel in
Toronto, the two West Coast executives
found out that Bnrrick under the-
driving leadership of founder and chair
man Peter Munk was mounting a bid
to buy their company
1
that day for al
most SI billion.
Less than seven weeks later, the
deed was done. But, in between, the
takeover raised a lot ot eyebrows. First,
Barnck s
$27-per-share opening bid
was considered "generous"
for a small
company with a new, relatively untest
ed gold find such as Arequipa. Even
more important, it reaffirmed the 68-
year-old Munk s seriousness when, less
than three months earlier, he promised
to double Barrick s size and rekindle
the market s excitement in its stock.
The deal is also notable as the latest
stage in Barrick s
three-year transfor
mation from conservative North
American producer into international
exploration and development giant.
Wielding a US$1 -billion line of credit
and stringing together a who s who
network of financiers, politicians and
geologists, Munk says he won t
stop
until he s created the world s
biggest
gold nuning company period.
At the time of the bid (worth
US$720 million), mining analysts esti
mated there were only 3.5 million
ounces of gold in Arequipa s Peruvian
"Pierina" ore body. That made Bar
rick s offer equivalent to a cost of
US$206 per ounce in the ground.
Considering that Barrick has been
spending about US$1 8<
I
to extract each
ounce of gold from its
existing mines
and that the market price of cold was
languishing below USS400 an ounce,
Barrick s offer seemed to hold little
hope of a
significant return.
The psychology behind Munk s
bid, however, was impeccable, hirst.
Barrick was confident there were more
than 3.5 million ounces of gold in the
ore body and Bay Street soon
changed its estimate to five million
ounces, maybe more. That lowered the
projected cost per ounce to about
US$144 still
expensive, but econom
ically feasible. Second, the offer was all
cash almost unheard of in the gold
mining industry, where takeovers are
invariably paid for with corporate
OCTOBER 199(> CANADIAN BUSINESS 33
MINING
paper. (Munk knew that a cash offer
would draw stock arbitrageurs into the
pame, thus ensuring a rational, calculated
a.id predictable bidding process.) Third,
everyone knew that Barrick had a US$1-
billion line of credit at the bank enough
to pay for the deal so, with no other
gold mining company in as good a
posi
tion, a bidding war was unlikely.
Barrick s bid was still a huge gamble,
however, because no one really knew
what Arequipa was worth. Lowell and his
team only discovered the Peruvian gold-
bearing geological anomaly in October
1995; exploratory drilling began this
April. When Barrick made its bid, Are
quipa had released results for only nine of
its
exploratory holes "We were very sur
prised,"
Lowell says. "We
thought a bid
would come later."
In fact, Munk s
charge upset Lowells
careful plans. The latter s clever promo
tion of Arequipa and its find helped push
the company s share price to a high of $35
in April from $2.50 in January. The stock
fell back to trade in the SI 8 to $22 range
for most of May and June, but Lowell
expected it to rebound as more drilling
results were released. Then Munk
intervened.
Consensus among insiders now is that
Pierina will probably "cap
out" jt almost
10 million ounces, although there- are no
guarantees. Based on the deal s eventual
purchase price of USSS in million
(CDN$30 a share), this will reduce Bar
rick s
acquisition cost to USS80 an ounce.
Capital costs for the mine, meanwhile, are
expected to be less than USS15U million,
while the revenue from the silver also to
be mined will reduce extraction costs to
between zero and USSlon an ounce. This
puts the expected total operating cost per
ounce at US$95 to US$195. For Bar
rick which posted a pretax profit of
USS390 million on revenue of US$1.3
billion last year that means a chance to
at least double its
Arequipa investment
over the next two decades.
An even greater potential upside lies in
the rest ofthe land package that Lowell as
sembled for Arequipa. Lowell has been
working the Andes for 25 years and dis
covered the Escondida mine in Chile, the
biggest copper mine in the world. So he
knows what he is
talking about when he
says Arequipa has one of the best land
packages of any company in Peru. "The
election of President Alberto] Fujimori
meant there was hope on the horizon, so
in January 1992 I decided the time had
259
ADNAN KHASHOGGI (with Munk,
above) was a key ally early in Munk s
career. Now Barrick s boss is drawing
on a long list of international contacts
come to go back in [to Peru]." says Low
ell. "This was well before the major com
panies made the same decision, so the
field was open for claim staking."
As the deadline for acceptance of Bar
rick s
original offer approached, Arequipa
tried to bring in other suitors to squeeze
out a
higher price. But no other bidders
could meet Barrick s timetable. Days be
fore the deadline, Munk called Lowell and
said he would raise the price to make it a
friendly deal. Bob Smith, Barrick s
presi
dent, and Bill Biggar, senior vice-presi
dent ofinvestments and the man in charge
of the takeover, then flew to Vancouver
offering $30 a share on the condition
that Lowell and his key executives agree to
tender their 23% stake to Barrick. Lowell
accepted, and Munk was on his way.
IT
WAS THE SUMMER OF 1995, AND
as Munk looked back over the previ
ous 1 8 months, he was more than a
little annoyed. For Barrick, 1994 had
not been a good year on the stock market.
Despite a banner year, when the compa
ny s
earnings and production broke all
records, its stock price had drifted errati
cally downward from its
peak 18 months
earlier. Admittedly, the market was sliding
for everyone, but Barrick s stellar perfor
mance should have insulated it from the
limp parade of less dynamic companies. It
was tough to understand. After several
years of exponential growth on the
strength of its
huge Goldstrike mine in
Nevada, Barrick had just swallowed one
of its
larger competitors, Lac Minerals
Ltd., in a US$1.7-billion takeover that
vaulted it into the top spot among North
American gold mining companies. Bar
rick had become the third-largest gold
mining company in the world and the
most profitable. To have done this was
noteworthy. To have done it from scratch,
less than 12 years after entering the gold
mining business, was exceptional. Yet
Barrick s stock could not break out of its
dreary pattern, ending the year 22%
below its
January 1994 high.
Even when stock prices recovered a bit
in the first half of 1995, Bamck s
insipid
recovery trailed the market. It would have
been enough to upset anyone coming off
34 CANADIAN BUSINESS OCTOBER
260
MINING
two fabulously successful years, but what
infuriated Munk, the company s driving
force, was that Barrick had suffered more
at the hands of this bear market than the
other three first-tier gold companies
Placer Dome Inc., Newmont Mining
Corp. and Homestake Mining Co. all of
which had performed worse than Barrick
over those two years, according to every
available yardstick.
When Munk is infuriated about some
thing, he doesn t stew about it. He gets
the issues on the table and in front of his
trusted colleagues. Barrick s senior man
agers sit around their Arthurian round
table once a week and Munk joins them
whenever he is in town, and so it was in
evitable that the sluggish performance of
Barrick s stock would surface in the
weekly sessions that summer. "Find out
why people have bought Placer Dome
shares and Newmont shares, but not our
shares in the last 18 months," Munk said
to his senior managers. "Just
find out."
The price of Barrick s shares is at the
very heart of Munk s business philosophy,
although not in a conventional way. He
passionately believes that the goal of a
company s
managers must be to maximize
the benefits (lowing to the shareholder
and maximizing shareholder benefits does
not mean increasing earnings per share by
10? a year. It means doubling the stock
price every three or four years. In his 4<i
year;, as an entrepreneur (and, latterl), a
tycoon), Munk has drummed that mes
sage into every single person with whom
he has worked, making it a mantra that
defines and drives his companies. Every
employee in Barrick receives, every day. .\
one-page sheet with .1 "market
update."
On the first few lines of that sheet, in
boldface, is Barrick s
closing price and
volume on the Toronto and New York
stock exchanges over the previous week
Then comes the same information for his
holding company, Horsham Corp., fol
lowed by key statistics about B.irnck s
major competitors the Newmonts and
Placer Domes whose stock prices had
provoked Munk s irritation.
Why then were analysts and investors
excited over Placer Dome at the expense
of Barrick? The analysts liked Placer
Dome, Barrick s
managers found out, be
cause it was in a lot of "plays";
Barrick
had focused on its handful of mines, in
vesting its time, energy and money in de
veloping them so as to become the most
profitable gold mining company in the
world. The analysts knew exactly what
was in store for Barrick, and decided they
preferred the uncertain potential of huge
gain from Pkccr Domes risky exploration
program to Barrick s solid profits.
It s a sensitive issue because up until
that year, the foundation of Barrick s suc
cess had been Munk s decision to avoid a
ration was out. The only drilling he want
ed to do was development drilling on
properties he already knew held gold in
commercial quantities.
As it
happened, Munks was an inspired
plan. Four years later, he had bought sev
eral producing mines that he was able to
MUNK PASSIONATELY believes
that maximizing shareholder benefits
means doubling Barrick s stock
price every three or four years
risk) exploration program as the route to
growth, choosing instead to grow by ac
quiring producing properties. Back in
1983, when Munk took his first
faltering
steps into the gold mining business after
a roller-coaster career of crushing failures
such as Clairtone Sound Corp. in the
1 960s as well as stunning successes, such as
the Travelodge hotel chain of the South
Pacific in the 1970s his vision was crys
tal clear. The big pension funds and mu
tual funds in Europe and North America
were major investors in gold mining
stocki, but they were getting nervous be
cause most of their holdings were in
South Africa, a nation that was heading
deeper and deeper into political trouble.
But there were no other suitable gold
mining stocks outside North America to
take their place and the pickings were
very slim on this continent. All but a half
dozen of the North American gold min
ing companies were "juniors"
small
companies with limited resources owned
by promoters or prospectors looking for
an "elephant,"
a huge discovery that
would catapult them into the major
leagues overnight. Pension funds, howev
er, don t invest in prayers. They want
solid, producing companies with a strong
cash flow that have some prospect of per
forming well in their portfolios for many
years to come.
To meet that need, Munk decided in
1983 that he would start buying small
mines that were in production but not
performing to their maximum capability.
He would buy them cheaply and wring
the last ounce of potential out of them
through superior management. Explo-
improve beyond his wildest dreams This
success, of course, only confirmed the
wisdom of staying away from "grassroots"
exploration on properties that held no
guarantee of success, so his exploration
budget languished accordingly. From 1 987
to 1993, Munk averaged little more than
US$5 million a year on grassroots explo
ration, a
pittance compared to his cash
flow, which soared to USS317 million
from USS37 million over the same seven
years. Placer Dome, by comparison, com
mitted itself to spending about US$70
million every year between 1992 and 1994
on grassroots exploration more than
25% of its cash flow.
This didn t mean Barrick wasn t
spend
ing heavily on development Once Bar
rick executives realized in 1987 that they
were sitting on a genuine elephant in their
Goldstnke property in Nevada acquired
that year for a paltry US$62 million from
owners who couldn t see its
potential
they poured all their energies into its de
velopment. During the next eight years,
Barrick sank more than US$1.6 billion
into its six mines, with Goldstrike alone ac
counting for more than US$1 billion.
During the heady years, when Gold-
strike was emerging from obscurity to be
come the biggest gold deposit on the
continent with its reserves of more than
40 million ounces, there was real excite
ment in the stock market over the gradu
al unveiling of Barrick s fabulous treasure
house, and investors showed their appre
ciation by awarding the company a pre
mium on its stock price to reflect its status
as a growth company. Now they had
taken that premium away. Barrick s very
36 CANADIAN BUSINESS OCTOBER 1996
MINING
261
success had raised the ante in analysts de
mand for an encore.
MUNX,
IN SOME WAYS, WAS
way ahead of the analysts.
More than two years pre
viously, in the first half of
1993, he had started wrestling with the
dilemma of his success. Back then, he
worried about Bamck turning into an in
stitutional bureaucracy. With the USS1-
billion development of its Goldstrike
mine behind it, Barrick was beginning to
feel large and profitable and the first
signs of flabbiness were starting to creep
in. The company s staff was still small
enough, and its culture still strong
enough, that there was no danger of the
operation becoming moribund or rou
tine, but the spigots were opening and the
cash was flowing. Munk knew that with
out a jolt from him the sense of urgency
that kept Barrick uut and entrepreneurial
would begin to fade.
In the winter of 1993, Munk took four
months off to ski at his chalet in KJosters,
Switzerland. Toronto saw little of him
during that rime; his colleagues thought
he was slowing down. Little did they
know he was staying up late into the nis:ht.
worrying about how he could reinject his
entrepreneurial spirit into his fabulous
business. Munk knew that if Barrick was
to continue growing, it had to switch its
attention to exploration now that die de
velopment phase had been completed at
Goldstrike. Having great reserves is one
thing; it s
quite another to find enough
new mines to replenish those reserves as
they are depleted by two million ounces a
year For a
company the size of Barrick.
moreover, new mines had to be substan
tial. It couldn t afford to toy with deposits
of 100,000 ounces here and 250,000
ounces there. For an ore body to have any
impact on Barrick s reserves, it had to con
tain one million ounces or more and
mines like that are hard to come by.
At the same time, Munk hedged his
bets, raising USJ700 million to diversity
out of gold through his holding company,
Horsham Corp., which, in addition to
owning USS1.5 billion worth of Barrick
shares, owned real estate in Berlin and an
oil
refining and marketing company in the
US Midwest. (The following year, Hor
sham also bought a 48% stake in fallen real
estate giant Trizec Corp. Ltd. for US$484
million.) Munk s next step was to create a
senior corporate development group for
Barrick He chaired it and charced it with
finding new gold deposits in South Amer
ica and Asia by whatever means were ap
propriate. In the space of a few months,
Munk wanted Barrick to shed its
image of
a strictly North American company in
pursuit of producing properties that it
could manage better than anyone else. In-
tion, onto his board. Munk was well
aware of Canadians feelings toward his
new recruit, but he also knew that Mul-
roney enjoyed immense prestige outside
Canada. After nine years of trotting
around the world meeting world leaders,
Mulroney had incomparable access to
BRIAN MULRONEY was added to
Barrick s board because he had
incomparable access in key spots
where Munk wanted to take Barrick
stead, he wanted Barrick to portray the
image of an international, aggressive
explorer.
Earlier in the year, Munk had brought
Brian Mulroney, the recently retired
prime minister who was the unhappy
lightning rod for the angst of a whole na-
presidents and prime ministers in all the
key spots where Munk wanted to take
Barrick. Through Mulroney, Munk knew
he could get to meet the presidents of
Chile and Argentina or the premier of
China. With that kind of access and
Munk s
ability to pitch an irresistible idea,
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MINING
262
Munk knew he could launch Barrick into
new mining fields at a speed that would
turn heads around the world.
By the spring of 1 994 Mulroney was
already making friendly calls on the pres
idents of Chile, Argentina and Peru,
among others. On the back of Mul
roney s introductions, Munk became
more familiar with the key countries of
Latin America. He was among the first to
see that there was a historic shift under
way. Dictatorships that had, for centuries,
blighted the prospects of an entire sub
continent were giving way to democra
cies that were opening up their
economies to the power and dynamism
of foreign capital. At last, companies such
as Barrick could contemplate, with some
degree of comfort, invesring in the im
mense mineral deposits of Latin America.
Governments there now recognized the
benefits that would accrue to their people
it
they allowed foreigners to take profits
home after investing in their countries.
About the same time, Munk set in
motion a
comprehensive review of Bar-
rick s
options in generating its next
growth phase. He let everyone know that
this was still "his"
company and that it was
still
entrepreneurial. He asked Smith to
put together an aggressive plan to acquire
new mines, and called a board meeting in
the dog days of summer to approve it. Hi-.
message was simple: we can no longer af
ford to amble along our growth path,
we ve got to sprint, and that means an
acquisition.
Within weeks, Munk bought Lac
Minerals, largely on the strength of its
Chilean properties. Its annual production
of one million ounces fitted his strategy
perfectly, and he grabbed it enthusiastical
ly when it
unexpectedly came up for sale.
By the end of 1994 Munk felt confident
he had set Barrick on a new path. The fi
nancial analysts, surely, would sit
up and
take notice. But they didn t.
THE
NEXT SUMMER, WHEN
Munk s
colleagues came back
telling him that the market
wanted more "exploration
plays,"
he decided to give the analysts
what they craved by more than doubling
Barnck s
budget for grassroots explo
ration. The budget for 1995 had been
USS30 million, which represented a
healthy increase from the previous year s
US$20 million (which, in turn, was a big
increase over the US$7 million alloted in
1993). Munk s new 1995 exploration
budget: US$80 million. About half this
money was earmarked for joint ventures
with individual prospectors or very small
gold companies looking for a partner to
do the development drilling and assess the
extent of a promising find. The rest was
for drilling in existing mines to gauge the
extent of their reserves.
Barnck s
exploration budget represents
a fearsome challenge for its
top executives.
Alan Hill, Barrick s executive vice-presi
dent of corporate development, the man
in charge of developing new ore bodies,
knows only too well that his neck is on
the line: "You know, we re better than
anybody ebe, but there are 1 50 companies
out there looking for the same thing.
You ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you
find a prince."
Barrick still won t
develop any proper
ty with less than one million ounces of
gold, but it will look seriously at
anything
any prospector brings to it. To drive the
point home about how not to implement
this strategy, Barrick suffered a huge dis
appointment in the fall of 1995 when a
small company it had narrowly missed
signing up as a partner announced it had
made the biggest gold discovery in the
world that year. The owners of Calgary
-
based Bre-X Minerals Ltd. had conic to
Barrick looking for a
partner in late 1993.
Barrick s
geologists liked the look of its
property in Indonesia and the company
made an offer: it would buy one million
Bre-X shares at $1.25 to SI. 50 per share
in return for the right to an 8(1% share of
any future Bre-X developments It was an
aggressive, even arrogant, proposal that
didn t leave a lot on the table for Bre-X,
and negotiations fizzled. A year and a halt
later Bre-X revealed that reserves on its
Indonesian property were at least 15 mil
lion ounces and maybe as much as 30 mil
lion ounces of gold. Bre-X s shares, then
$4, shot up to $59. A few months later, as
more details emerged of the immensity of
the find, the shares continued their climb,
passing $270 in May 1 996 (S27 after a 1
<
i-
for-1 split).
At this price the market was
guessing that Bre-X s ore body contained
more than 50 million ounces of gold.
To make sure the next Bre-X does not
fall
through Barnck s
grasp, Munk has
tightened up the process of makjng deals
with junior companies and multiplied the
projects that Barrick gets involved in. It
was just at the end of last year that Barrick
announced it had arranged a revolving
credit facility for US$1 billion from Royal
Bank of Canada. As the Arequipa
42 CANADIAN BUSINESS OCTOBER 1996
263
MINING
takeover subsequently showed, this credit
line, plus Barrick s annual cash flow of
US$500 million, will buy a lot of deals
even after the heavy development spend
ing planned for ore bodies in mines the
company already owns.
"Five
years from now," Munk says,
"this is what will give us the windfalls for
the next three Goldstrikes." He paces
round his office, punching his left palm
with his right fist. "I will never be able to
put gold in the ground. But to bring an
entrepreneurial component into my com
pany when I ve got cash flow of$500 mil
lion a year if I can t do that, then I should
be shot through the head or be fired."
EVEN
WITH THE AREQUIPA
success, Barrick now finds it
self in a race for time. Having
arrived on the international
scene many years after its
major competi
tors, it has only just put its
exploration
strategy in place and must now conduct
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an effective exploration program for a
three- or four-year period of heightened
competition. In late 1993 Barrick hired a
vice-president of exploration, Alex
Davidson. During his first two years at
Barrick, Davidson established a compre
hensive network among all
potential gold
sites in the world. By this
spring, he had
employed about 60 geologists based in 1
offices two in the US and Canada, five
in South America (Chile, Peru, Argenti
na, Brazil and Bolivia), one in Africa
(Mali) and two in Asia (Indonesia/China,
and the Philippines). The job of these ge
ologists is to find mines big enough for
Barrick and that means a minimum of
one million ounces of gold.
"When a junior [mining company]
comes up with something," says David
son, "we have a team in place that is fa
miliar with the geology, and probably
familiar with the junior itself, ready to
evaluate th.it
property"
If Barrick decides
to cut a deal with the prospector (which
may be a junior gold company or a lone
rockhound equipped with a four-wheel-
drive truck), Davidson prefers to do it in
"earn-in
options." whereby Barrick
aerees to spend specified amounts on ex
ploration drilling in order to earn any
thing from 5"". to 90% ownership of any
mines that may be developed
With an annual budget of more than
USS50 million, Davidson can afford to
complete a lot of these deals; by this
spring he had already signed more than
5(1. He also does joint- venture agreements
with juniors, similar to the deal discussed
with Bre-X In addition. Barrick has also
embarked o:, its own grassroots explo
ration. "We re exploring thousands and
thousands of square kilometres," says
Davidson. "Our
target is another big de
posit of 30 million or 60 million ounces."
Munk is
elephant hunting again. Typ-
icallv. the hunt is
tightly focused, method
ical and comprehensive. He is no longer
the man who. in the first half of 1993,
pondered the dilemma of his success and
concluded that perhaps Barrick had be
come a mature "commodity play"
and
that it was. perhaps, time to withdraw
gracefully. He has changed his mind dra
matically about Barrick. "We are going to
do some very exciting things,"
Munk says.
Stay tuned. HE
Ad,iptcJ/nnii Peter Munk: The Making of
a Modern Tycoon, by Donald Rumball.
Published this fall by Stoddart Publishing Co.
Ltd.; reprinted hy permission.
264
MMSA GOLD MEDAL
CANDIDATE INFORMATION
CANDIDATES NAME
J. David Lowell
ADDRESS
789 Av. Bcatriz
Rio Rico, Arizona 85648
Business Office:
Tucson, Arizona
Santiago, Chile
TELEPHONE
(520) 281-8271; 281-8866, 888-5289
Cellular: (520) 237-9355
Fax:(520)281-7019
BRIEF EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
1949-1951: Engineer to Mine Foreman, ASARCO, Saiiu Eulalia, Mexico
1951-1954: Geologist to District Geol., USAEC, Grand Junction, Colorado
1954-1956: Graduate Student, Stanford University
1956 1959: Chief Geologist. Southwest Ventures, Tucson. Arizona
Mine Manager, Menlove Daltor Mine, 1956-57
:> 9-1961: Diitna Gzologisi, bun Cons:rucuon Co.. San Francisco and Tucson
1961 1998: Consulting geologist and manager of various contract exploration programs
f.nanced by major mining complies ur.d joint ventures with majors. From 1993
to 1996 Chairman of public financed company.
1 961 -Present: Consulting geologist 100 U.S. and foreign mining and engineering companies and
governments. Consultant on geological, mine design, and grade control problems.
Participated in 13 major feasibility studies. Managed contract exploration projects
which discovered Kaiamazoo and Casa Grande West orcbodies in the U.S. and La
Escondida, Zaldivar, and San Cristobal orebodics in Chile. Member of discovery
teams for Vekol Hills, AZ; JA, BC Canada Dizon and FSE-Upanto, Pnilippines;
Leonor, Chile; Los Calatos and Pricrina Peru. Director, IMDI S.A., operator San
Cristobal 10,000 TPD gold mine in Chile. Former Chairman of the Board,
Arequipa Resources Lid., Vancouver, Canada. Principal, Minerals Advisory
Group, LLC.
265
MINING INDUSTRY
Memberships/Registration
Arizona Board of Technical Reg.stratian
Registered Geologist 1960
Registered Mining Engineer 1967
Committees
U.S. Committee, Continental Scientific Drilling, 1980
Oi ficcrsliips
Gen Mgr. Ranwick Inc., Subs Ventures Ltd. of" Canada 1955-56
V.P. Southwesr Ventures, Subs Ventures Ltd. of Canadi 1956-59
Pres. Lowe II Mineral Exploration Lida. de Chile 1990-98
Pres ExploracioiKS Mincras Lowell, S.A. de C.V., Mexico 1997-98
Partner Minera del Jr.ca Mining Co., Chile 1984 87
President Acuanos Minera dc Peru 1991-96
Chairman Arequipa Resources, Canada ] 993 -96
President CAP II, LLC, Arizona 1996 98
President LME. LLC, Arizona 1998
Awards
Sec under Professional Sooenes
See attached.
266
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES
Memberships
American Institute of Mining Engineers
Mining and Metallurgical Society of America
Arizona Geological Society
Society of Economic Geologists
Chilean Institute dc Ingenicros dc Minas
Committees
MMSA Mining Image Committee
Chairman, A.G.S. Publication Committee Arizona Highway Geol. Map
Planning Committee Society Exploration Geochemists
Officerships
Vice President, Yavapai Sub Section, AiME, 1956
President, Vnvap&i Sub Station, AIME, 1957
Vice President, Arizona Geol. Society, 1973
President, Arizona Geol. Society, 1974
Awards
1970 AIME, Daniel Jackling Award
1974 CIMM, Distinguished Lecturer
1975-80 SEC, Associate Editor, Econ Gcolo&y
1977 SEG, Tha>er Lindslcy Di^ir.guiiV.r: Lecturer
1982 SEG. Silver Mcda!
1994 American Mining Hali of" Fame, Mccal of Merit
Publications
Attached list of 44 publications
267
ACADEMIA/EDUCATIONAL
Education
1949 -
B.S. Min Engr., University of Arizona
1957 - MS Geology, Stanford University
1959 - E. Geol., University of Arizona
Memberships
Alumni Association -
University of Arizona and Stanford University
Committees
U.A. Search Committee, Dean College Earth Sciences
U.A. Search Committee, Head Department of Geosciences
Organizing Committee, New College of Mines. Universidad Mayor dc San Marcos
Officerships
Chairman, Univcriily of Arizona Fund Raisin^ Committee
Awards
Engineer of Geology, Honorary Professional Degree awarded year!> by University of
Arizona College of Mines
University of Arizona Distinguished Citizen Award
Nominated for Doctor Causa Honor Degree by Universidad Mayor dc San Marcos, Lima,
Peru
Publications
Sec a, ui.;hciJ hi;
CIVIC SOCIETAL
Memberships
Prince of Wales Country Club, Sa/uiago, Chile
Mining Club of the Southwest, Tucson. Arizona
Committees
Officerships
Member of ihe Board of Directors, Mining Club of the Southwest
Awards
University of Arizona Distinguished Citizen Award
268
MINING AND METALLURGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Committee*
1998 Mining Image Committee
Officcrships
None
Portion Papers
None
Two luncheon talks, Tucson Section
269
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Technical Field
Managed uranium mine in Utah.
Participated in 13 major feasibility studies.
Managed seven exploration programs.
Found or managed exploration projects in nine major ore discoveries including
KaJamazoo, Escondida, Zaldivar and Pierina Mines.
Business Field
Vice President, Southwest Ventures, subsidiary Ventures Ltd., Canada
President, Lowell Mineral Exploration LLC, Lowell Mineral Exploration Ltda. (Chile),
Exploracioncs Minera* Lowell S. A. de C. V. (Mexico). Acuarios Minera (Peru)
Chairman. Arequipa Resources (Canada)
Academic/Educational Field
University of Arizona, member of two faculty search committees, Chairman fund raising
committee
Member Geoscicnces Advisory Committee
Several lectures, Advanced Ore Deposits courses
Civic/Societal Field
Member, U.S. Continental Scientific Drilling Committee
Member of Arizona Cattle Growers Association
Member of Arizona Cattlemen s Protective Society
Tb ks at Arizona public schools
Republican Party activities
Advocacy of the Mining Industry
Member of MMSA Mining Image Corrmucee
Participated in several University or
Arizona uks
OTHER MERITS OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Taught Geology Short Course, Universidad de Chile.
Lectures in Canada, U.S.. Mexico, Peru, Chile, Australia, Philippines, China, Lngland
and France
Keynote Speaker, AGA/SEG Meeting, 1992
Keynote Speaker, Investing in the Andes, Melbourne, Australia, 1993.
Expert Witness, 11 Court Cases. U.S. and Canada
Keynote Speaker (in Spanish), Chilean National Library ceremony honoring Carlos Ruiz,
retiring Director Chilean Institute de Investigacioncs Geologicos.
270
from The Southern Miner, Fall 1996
Point and counterpoint
Pierina: a billion dollar mountain
On August 16, Arequipa issued a
press release recommending that share
holders accept an improved offer by
Barrick of C$30 in cash or 0.79 of a
Barrick common share plus C$0.50 cash
for each Arequipa share. This offer works
out to a price of C$1,026 million for
Arequipa. Congratulations to the new
batch of Arequipa millionaires and partic-
ularly to David Lowell on a fine explo
ration job, and to Catherine McLeod on an
outstanding and professional job.
"fr
I iew of the 4000m mountain thai hosts Pierina.
By all accounts Barrick s bid is
markable. Over a billion dollars
[anadian) in cash for an unproven gold
jposit is almost unheard of. However,
equipa s share price had previously
luched C$35/share and the only way to
lake the owners of Arequipa sit up and
Ike note would be to bid at somewhere
lound this level. Catherine McLeod s
icellent and highly professional promo-
)n of Arequipa has clearly paid off. Also,
significantly lower bid would likely have
:>arked a bidding war.
Barrick has signed a lock-up agree-
ent with key shareholders and directors
"
Arequipa who together hold 23% of the
sued common shares of Arequipa, which
immits them to tender their shares. In the
/em of another bid exceeding $31 .50/shr
hich Barrick does not match, the locV
>reement would be terminate
1
reak-up fee of C$18 million \
payable to Barrick if another bid is suc
cessful.
Barrick s initial bid for Arequipa
Resources in the first half of July of C$27
per Arequipa share placed a value of
C$915 million for the company. This bold
and unusual ofTer was made at a time
when Arequipa still had published no
reserve data. At that time the drill results
for only 9 drillholes and 90 pits had been
reported in a gold anomalous area cover
ing 280,000 mj .
On August 8 Arequipa reported addi
tional drill results indicating extensions of
the ore deposit, including a blind ore
deposit to the SE of the main zone, and
recommended that shareholders not
accept the Barrick offer. It was rumored
that a competing offer was pending.
Both Barrick s bid and the Pierina
discovery itself will put some real oomph
back into Peru s gold exploration. It was
time for a new major discovery to follow
Newmont s excellent success at
Yanacocha. Pierina is sparking something
of an area play in Peru and the Barrick
offer could set a new standard in valuing
gold prospects in the Andes.
Crazy bid price?
The price bid by Barrick for Arequipa
has been described by experienced mem
bers of the mining and exploration indus
try as "crazy."
C$1 billion is comparable
with the market capitalization
of Cia. de
Minas Buenaventura, a Peruvian mining
company which owns a large piece of the
fabulous Yanacocha gold mine, and a
huge portfolio
of promising exploration
projects throughout some of the most
prospective
areas of Peru.
Barrick came close to acquiring Bre-
X and the bid for Arequipa has been inter
preted as a possible over-reaction after
missing out there.
Counter-point: Barrick s track record
The offer would be "crazy"
if it had
been made by anyone other than Barrick.
Barrick Gold has a history of seeking
out elephants and paying handsomely for
them. Barrick is a master at acquiring
properties and projects with elephant
potential and then maximizing this poten
tial. But Barrick has also been risk-averse
in the past and has had its downside more
or less covered. What has Barrick seen in
Arequipa that the rest of the industry has
missed?
Barrick has a track record of recog
nizing and pursuing projects with huge
upside potential. David Lowell, chairman
of Arequipa and discoverer of Escondida,
has a proven track record as an elephant
hunter. Clearly Barrick sees huge potential
in Pierina and other deposits like it in the
large property position that Arequipa has
assembled.
If Barrick is prepared to pay, for argu
ment s sake, USSlOO/oz for gold potential,
then they must see around at least 7 million
oz gold in Arequipa. Barrick is clearly look
ing beyond the current 280,000 m2
area
(400m x 700m) tested so far.
Barrick s bidding history
Barrick Gold in 1986 bid US$60 mil
lion for the Goldstrike gold property
which turned into a "company
maker
when deep drilling identified the best gold
271
deposit in North America. At the time
Banrick made its bid, about 600,000 oz
gold could be identified in reserves scat
tered around the property.
Barrick could have recovered most of
its $60 million acquisition price by min
ing the 600,000 oz had deep drilling not
been successful at the property. In this
sense, Barrick had its downside covered.
At the time, industry observers expressed
the opinion that $60 million was far too
much money to bid for Goldstrike.
Neighboring Newmont certainly would
not have considered paying even a frac
tion of this price. It is rumored that Bob
Smith was "praying
for a 2 million oz
deposit at Goldstrike" when they acquired
the property.
Next, Barrick bid and paid $1.6 bil
lion for Lac Minerals which owned the El
Indio, Nevada and Tambo deposits and
mine in the Chilean Andes inland from La
Serena, copper-gold deposits in Canada,
and several promising exploration proper
ties. Improvements in the mine and plant
at El Indio, and discovery of the Pascua
deposit nearby, along with a new under
ground gold deposit at Doyon gold mine
in Quebec, have more than justified the
price paid for Lac Minerals. Some of the
purchase price could be recovered by sell
ing off lesser assets. There was also sig
nificant additional exploration potential in
the surrounding areas. This price was also
originally considered very high, but again
Barrick seems to have acquired a huge
upside opportunity while having their
downside covered by production from
reserves that they could already see.
In the case of the C$1,026 million bid
for Arequipa, there are a few additional
assets that can be sold off to recover a part
of this purchase price, but the value of
Arequipa s joint venture copper explo
ration projects with Phelps Dodge and
Asarco is unknown, but could possibly be
as high as say C$100 million depending
on results. Arequipa s interest in the El
Ferrol deposit near Cajamarca has been
factored in, but recent reports since
Barrick made its bid indicate that El Ferrol
exploration so far has had disappointing
results.
Barrick has not discussed its bid for
Arequipa, but it
appears that they are
mostly interested in the Pierina deposit
and exploration potential in both the
immediate area and in the huge land posi
tion with similar geology that David
Lowell has assembled.
Arequipa is drilling
Arequipa clearly has great faith in
Pierina to prove up a huge ore deposit,
otherwise David Lowell would not have
kept on drilling furiously while Barrick s
initial bid was pending.
Arequipa has three drills operating
night and day at Pierina completing one
and a half holes per day down to 200-225
m depth. Each night drill samples are
ven to Lima and prepared for us
Samples are being assayed by three lal
ratories in Lima with check assay sampi
being sent to Vancouver. It
currently ta
about one week to get the assay results
Results of the first nine holes
ninety pits indicate an excellent dept
with high gold grades and excellent ad
tional silver values. For example, at OC
OOE (DDH1) 88m of 6.58 g Au/t and
g Ag/t was reported, and at 300S-2C
(RC-5) 107m of 5.98 g Au/t was repor
with additional results still pending fr
below this interval.
In fast tracking its drilling progran
generate a preliminary drill-indica
resource on the main Pierina zo
Arequipa focussed exploration efforts,
following the extensions to mineral)
tions below cover. On August 8 the res
of 34 holes on the main zone and south;
extension and an additional 5 drill he
testing the south anomaly area located
km from the main Pierina zone \v
reported.
Some 30 of the 34 holes intercep
ore grade mineralization. Tunneling
drilling results indicaled continuity of
main Pierina ore deposit and demonst
ed the existence of a still open "blind"
zone to the SE that does not outcrop.
272
from The Northern Miner n.d.]
I SWETN
273 From Wall Street Journal, July 12,
1996
"
Barrick Gold Plans to Make Offer
Of $669.5 Million to Buy Arequipa
By MARK HEINZL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TORONTO - Barrick Gold Corp., seek
ing to bolster its gold reserves, said it will
offer 915.3 million Canadian dollars
(US$669.5 million) to acquire Arequipa
Resources Ltd., which owns a promising
gold property in Peru.
Barrick. the world s third-largest gold
producer in terms of annual production
and North America s biggest, is bidding
for Arequipa, based in Vancouver, British
Columbia, at an early stage in that com
pany s determination of the size of its
Pierina gold deposit in Peru. The offer
reflects the increased market values at
tached to mineral-exploration companies,
amid a recent boom in world-wide explora
tion that has led to some rich mineral
discoveries, analysts said.
The offer is "a substantial sum to
pay ... for a project that doesn t have
proven and probable reserves yet." said
Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette Securities
Corp. mining analyst John Tumazos.
Barrick. which had 36 5 million ounces
of proven and probable gold reserves at the
start of this year, estimates that Pierina so
far contains an unproven "resource" of
about five million ounces of gold and
so-called gold equivalent silver, a spokes
man said. (Gold-equivalent silver is a way
of expressing an amount of silver in terms
of gold ounces.)
But Terence Ortslan, a mining analyst
with T.S. Ortslan & Associates in Mon
treal, said that based on the offer, Barrick
is probably assuming Pierina has "no less
than 10 million ounces in the ground."
Barrick Chief Financial Officer Randall
Oliphant said the offer is "generous," but
that there s probably more gold to be
discovered at Pierina.
Gold companies are constantly under
pressure to add new gold reserves while
existing reserves are mined out. Barrick s
last major acquisition, the 1994 purchase of
Lac Minerals Ltd., proved to be a success
after recent drilling turned up new gold
reserves on acquired properties in Chile.
Barrick said it will offer C$27 for each
share of Arequipa, whose shares jumped
C$6.60, or 307,, to CS2S.60 with 5.8 million
shares traded on the Toronto Stock Ex
change yesterday. Arequipa s stock traded
at just CS2 at the start of the year,
before the potential of Pierina was known.
Barrick s stock yesterday dropped CSI.-10
to C$3b.50.
Analysts were split on whether a com
peting bid is likely. Few other mining
companies would be able to top Barrick s
all-cash offer, they noted. Arequipa de
timed to cumiiicnt un the offer.
274 From London Financial Times, July
12, 1996
Golden girl
Peter MunKs Barrick Gold
might be thought to be taking a bit
of a gamble with yesterday s hefty
USS670m bid for Arequipa
Resources of Vancouver. For
Arequipa. a mere four years old.
has no mines, and its mnin
exploration property in Peri: has
yet to be fully sampled.
All the same. Munk may turn
out to have made a canny choice
on where to place hjs chips.
Arequipa s founder and chairman,
David Lowell, is something of a
legend in the mining industry.
Lowell, now in his late 60s and
living in Arizona, is credited with
the discovery of Chile s Escondida,
the world s biggest copper mine.
Another Arequipa director is a
former president of Placer Dome,
another respected name in the gold
business
Arequipa s chief executive.
Catherine V.cLeod, is among only a
handlul of women in the upper
echelons of the mining business
Mining certainly runs in the veins.
Her father heads another small
Vancouver mining company and
her brother is a mining engineer.
Instead of spending holidays on the
beach, the McLed familv used to
head for old mining camps.
McLeod, who is in her late 30s,
v. ill do well if Barrick (or someone
else) ends up buying Arequipa. The
bid values her stake at almost
CJ:9m. not counting several million
dollars worth of options. A
reasonable reward for those missed
sand castles?
275 From Financial Times, August 19, 1996
David Lowell has sold out to Barrick Gold
Arequipa
sale nets
founder
C$87m
David
Lowell s
achievements as a
geologist already
have secured him a place in
the Mining Hall of Fame.
Now they have also made
him a very rich man. At the
weekend he was celebrating
1
after agreeing to sell the
company he set up four
years ago to Barrick Gold,
North America s biggest gold
producer, for more than
C$lbn (US$728m) and on
terms that value his per
sonal holding at C$87m.
It Is for copper rather than
gold that Mr Lowell won his
place In mining history. In
1970 he wrote a paper about
a different way of finding big
copper deposits. Since then,
many other geologists have
successfully employed that
theory. He, himself, has col
lected six "finder s fees" for
copper projects, culminating
In the 1981 discovery of
Escondida In Chile, now the
world s biggest copper mine.
The Escondida discovery
would have allowed him to
retire and live comfortably
for the rest of his life.
Instead, Mr Lowell, who Is
now 68. set off to test his
theories in Peru.
In South America he met
Ms Catherine McLeod,
daughter of a Canadian min
ing entrepreneur and then
wcrMnsi for stockbroker
David Lowell and Catherine McLeod: met in South America
Yorkton Securities in Sant
iago Previously Mr Lowell
had acted as a consultant for
oth<r companies. When Ms
McLeod realised the poten
tial of the properties he had
assembled in Peru, she per-
suaied him to set up his
own company instead. He
later appointed her presi
dent.
Arequipa was launched on
the Vancouver exchange late
in 1994 at 78 Canadian cents
a share. In January this year
the shares were trading at
C$2.50. Barrick bid CS27 cash
in July but had to lift the
offer to C$30 to win the back-
Ing of Mr Lowell and Ms
Ms McLeod is now 36. Her
shares and options are worth
abC Ut C$17m and several
other Arequipa directors and
employees are now dollar
millionaires.
/joqulpa s prime asset is
the Picrina gold deposit
-lOOkni north of Lima. Are
quipa had sunk only nine
drill holes into Pierina
before the Barrick bid and
these suggested there might
be 3.5m troy ounces of gold
there. Barrick obviously
believes there is much more.
So do Mr Lowell and Ms
McLeod. During the five
weeks while the first bid was
on the table, Arequipa
speeded up drilling on the
site and the results were
encouraging.
Mr Lowell says the new
bid offers Arequipa share
holders the chance to benefit
from further discoveries at
Pierina or the several other
projects the company has
been developing in Peru
because Barrick is now offer
ing cash or a shares-and-
cash alternative.
"I
personally will elect to
receive a substantial portion
of my consideration in Bar
rick stock," he says.
276
INDEX-- J. David Lowell
Acuarios Minera, 174-176, 199
AFMAG geophysical method, 89-90
Aguas Calientes Mine, Chihuahua,
Mexico, 26-28, 30-32
Ajo Mine, AZ, 116
Allende government in Chile, 142,
157, 203, 210-211
Amax, 165, 202
American Institute of Mining
Engineers [AIME] , 100, 213;
Daniel Jackling Award, 106
Anaconda Company, 96, 119, 162-
163
Andina Mine, Chile, 118, 169
Anglo-American Company, 162
Applin, Carl, 47
Arequipa Resources, 95, 175-178,
189, 190-201, 207, 209
Argentina, mining in, 117-122,
124, 126; population of, 217
Arizona, early history of, 5-7,
11-12, 205
Arizona Geologic Society, 99
Arizona Highway Department, expert
witness for, 127-128
Arnold, Clark, 117, 121
Asarco, 34-45, 49, 68, 75, 112-
113, 150, 172, 178
Aspillaga, Julia, 161-162
Aspillaga de Munizaga, Maria
Elena, 203
Atacama Project, Chile, 142, 144-
160
Atascosa Ranch, 209, 220-222
Atlas Consolidated Mining Company,
134
Atomic Energy Commission, 45-54,
58, 86-88
Ayub, Emilia and Romeo, 39
Bajo Alumbrera, Argentina, 120,
121
Banner Mining Company, 108
Barnes, Hugh, 97
Barrick Gold Company, 109, 189,
194-201
Barton, Paul, 97
Battle Mountain Gold Company, 167
Bechtel Company, 163-164, 213,
215
Bell, Jerry, 79, 81, 83
Benavides, Alberto, 177-178
Benavides, Jorge, 177-178
Benguet Corporation, 134, 139
Bernstein and Thompson, 162
Bethlehem Copper Company, 140,
141-142
Bethlehem Gold Company, 190
BHP, 107, 148. See also Utah
Construction and Mining
Bigger, Bill, 194
Blagburough, John, 47
block caving system, 210
Bonder-Clegg Lab, 184
Bougainville Copper Company, 213
Bourret, Wes, 66
Bowman, Allen, 108
Boyles Geotech, 145
Braden Mine, Chile, 142, 169
Brant, Arthur, 71, 106
Bratt, Jim, 155
Bre-X, 200
breccia pipe (in copper genesis),
85
bribery /corruption, in Third World
nations, 122-126, 191-192, 218
Brimhall, George, 85
Brown, A. A., 35
Brown, Severn, 43
Buena Tierra Mine, Chihuahua,
Mexico, 25, 35-38, 44
Buenaventura Mining Company, 178
Bulganio, Sergio, 203
Bureau of Land Management, 116
Burnham, Wayne, 97
Burns, Pat, 161-162
Butazoni, Pedro, 151-152, 154, 156
277
California Cuatro claim, Peru,
185
Camponetti, Mrs., 167-168
Canadian Mining and Metallurgical
Society, lectures for, 98-99
Carlin Mine, NV, 71-72, 109
Casa Grande West Mine, AZ. See
Covered Area Project
Centre de Investigaciones Mineras
y Metallurgies, 210
Centromin Corporation, 180-181
Cerro Blanco Mine, Chile, 118
Cerro Colorado deposit, Chile,
169
Cerro de Pasco Corporation, 177,
181
Cerro Verde Mine, Peru, 118, 170
Chapman, Thomas, 16-17, 23, 26,
34
Chester, Will, 80
Chile, culture of, 216-217
Chile, mining in, 109-110, 124-
126, 138, 142-168, 171-174,
191, 210-211, 219; Andina Mine,
118, 169; Atacama Project, 142,
144-158; Braden, 142, 169;
Cerro Blanco, 118; Cerro
Colorado, 169; Chuquicamata,
118, 142, 144, 163, 164, 169,
211; Collahuasi, 169;
Disputada, 118, 169, 211; El
Indio Mine, 162; El Salvador,
118, 144, 169; El Teniente,
118, 169; El Tesoro, 148-150,
166; La Escondida, 98, 109,
144, 148-159, 161, 166, 169,
202; Leonor, Chile, 109, 148,
165-168; Mocha, 169; Pelambres,
169; Quebrada Blanca, 118, 169;
Rio Blanco, 169; San Cristobal
Mine, 109, 161-164, 166;
Sorpresa claim, 166-167;
Zaldivar deposit, 109, 144,
154-158
Chile, visa for, 170-171
China, travels in, 212-213
Chuquicamata, Chile, 118, 142,
144, 163, 164, 169, 211
claims, mining, 69, 81, 112-113,
123-124, 126, 144-145, 149,
151-154, 164, 166-167, 182-184
Clayton, Hugh, 37, 39-40
coal mining, 66
Cockle, Bob, 20, 23
Codelco, 142-143, 210, 211
Collahuasi, Chile, 169
Cominco, 63
Compania La India, 60
Compton, Bob, 56
concentric zone theory in copper
geology, 74, 80, 85, 95-97,
101, 150-151
Concepcion, Roger, 135-136, 141
consultant, mining, 34, 68-85,
95-96, 99-101, 139-143, 157,
165, 210-211, 215-216
Cooley, Spade, 113
copper exploration, 61-62, 66,
68, 94, 108, 110-115, 130, 141-
143, 149-153, 165-168, 172-178.
See also porphyry copper
deposits
copper, price of, 142, 167. See
also prices, mineral
Copper Basin district, Colorado,
61-62
Courtright, Harold, 75, 150-151,
159-160, 212
Cove School Drilling Camp,
Arizona, 46-49, 51
Covered Area Project [CAP], 110-
115, 142-143
Cragmont, B.C., 139
Creasey, Cy, 73-74
Croft, Charles, 162
cross-stratification geologic
theory, 51-53
Cuajone, Peru, 118, 170
Cullen, Arnold, 76
Cullen, Roy, 76
Gumming, Douglas, 220-221
Gumming family history, 4-7
Gumming, John (uncle), 7, 12
Cyprus Minerals exploration group,
lectures for, 98
278
Davies, Peter, 117, 121
De Beers diamonds, 192
Department of Mineral Resources,
77, 78
Depression, the Great, 2, 10-11
Derek, Joe, 117
diamond drill, use of, 47, 163,
183-184, 187-189
Disini, Art, 141
Disputada Mine, Chile, 118, 169,
211
Dizon, Philippines, 139
Dominican Republic, mining in,
86-88
drilling operations, 32, 108-110,
139-142, 144-148, 154-156, 161-
163, 165, 177-179, 196
Du Pont Corporation, 212-213
Duval Corporation, 70
Garcia, Alan, 170, 172
General Electric, 107
geology, studies in, 51, 54-57
Getty Minerals, 144, 148, 155-156
Getty Oil Company, 111-115
Gibraltar, BC, 139
Glamis Gold Company, 163
gold mining, 9, 20, 27, 94, 109,
120, 123, 133, 134-135, 141,
161-165, 178-179, 181-189, 192-
194, 198, 200, 213
Goodfarb, Stanley Z., 127
Gordon, Ernie, 86-88
Grade, Margaret Lowell (sister),
1-2, 9, 93
Gruner, John, 54
Guilbert, John, 80, 95-97, 151,
181
Gustafson, Lew, 119-120
Economic Geology, 51n, 52-53, 62,
96-97, 166
economics, mineral, 210-211
Egert, Ernesto, 202-203
El Indio Mine, Chile, 162
El Salvador Mine, Chile, 118,
144, 169
El Teniente Mine, Chile, 118
El Tesoro Mine, Chile, 148-150,
166
Ellett, Dick, 90-91
Endako Mine, BC, 139
environmental movement, 115-117
Environmental Protection Act, 115
Epic, Johnny, 47
Ewnachuk, Hank, 190-191
Exxon, 211
Falconbridge Nickel, 60
Far Southeast ore body,
Philippines, 140-141
fossil casts, 50
Frisco Mines (company), 215-216
Fujimori, Alberto, 92, 94, 172,
179
Fulton, Bob, 70-72, 74-75, 85,
102, 106
Haldeman, Robert M. , 168
Hanna Mining Company, 111-114
Hansen, Don, 128
Harris Drilling Company, 145, 161
Harris, Hugh, 145
Harshbarger, John, 50
health issues/medical care, 1, 8,
20-21, 38, 42, 204
Hecla Mining Company, 102, 211
Helgeson, Hal, 97
helicopters and planes, in mining
exploration, 89-91, 117-121,
130-132, 135-139, 146-147, 172-
174, 177-178, 184-185, 214
Hertzel, Fritz, 35, 44
Hewitt, Bill, 43
Hickman, Bob, 158
Hill, Allen, 194
Hillard, Pat, 185-187, 189
Holland, Heinrich, 97
housing at mine sites, 14, 22,
24-25, 27, 34, 39-42, 47-48, 49
Howe-Sound Mining Company, 44
Huanqui, Fredy, 180-181, 184-186
Huestis, Spud, 108
Humphreys, Susan Lowell
(daughter), 5, 35, 47, 56-57,
69, 206-207
279
Hutton, Colin Osborne, 56
Idarado Mine, CO, 20-23, 32-33
Idziszek, Chet, 195
iron mining, 66, 68, 90-91
Iron Springs Mine, UT, 90-91
Ishihara, Shunsho, 140
JA ore body, BC, 141-142
Jackson, David, 196-197
Jacobs Assay Lab, 83
Japanese Geological Survey, 140
Johnson, Bill, 61-62
Johnson, Ted, 76-78
Johnson, Vreeland, 130-132
Jones , J. 0. , 46
Kaiser Aluminum Company, 117-120
Kalamazoo ore body, 73, 77-81,
83-85, 95-97, 101-102, 109
Kaufman, Mo, 102
Kennecott Copper Company, 60,
165, 166, 202
Kern County Land Company, 70, 136
Kidd Creek Mine, Canada, 49
King, Dan, 23-26
Kirschner, Erik, 89
Kittredge, Tyler, 147-148
Korean War, 63-65, 138
Kuo, Tom, 213
La Escondida, Chile, 98, 109,
144, 148-159, 161, 166, 169,
202
Lacy, John, 195
Lady, Bill, 130
Langerfeld, Hans, 150-151
leached capping, 150-151, 154-155
Leonor claim, Chile, 109, 148,
165-168
Lepanto Consolidated Mining
Company, 134-136, 140-141
Lihir Island, Papua New Guinea,
166
Lindsley, Thayer, 60-61; Thayer
Lindsley Lecturer, 97-98
Livermore, John, 71-72
Los Calatos, Peru, 94, 177-178
Los Lamentos, Chihuahua, Mexico,
24-26, 32
Los Pinos, Peru, 174
Loudon, Geoffrey, 140, 165-166
Lowell, Arthur Currier (father),
2-4, 7-9, 11, 13-14, 15, 16,
19-20, 31-32, 93
Lowell, David, 1-222 passim
Lowell, Douglas Glenton (son),
57, 69-70, 132; and Roxanne
Chernin, 208
Lowell, Edith Sykes (wife), 19-
20, 25, 26, 28, 29-30, 33-34,
40, 43, 47-48, 53, 55, 57-59,
62-64, 66, 68-69, 80, 83, 85,
95, 204-206, 212-213
Lowell family history, 2-4
Lowell grandchildren, 206-208
Lowell, Hervey William (brother),
1-2, 10, 12-13, 14, 15, 63, 64
Lowell, Lavina Gumming (mother),
2-5, 7-9, 11-13, 15, 16, 19-20,
25, 56, 93
Lowell, Susan (daughter). See
Humphreys, Susan Lowell
Lowell, William David (son), 57,
69, 207
Luksic, Andronico, 166-167, 191
Madeleine Mine, Quebec, Canada,
72
Magma Copper Company, 105-106
mapping, geologic, 51-53, 72, 82-
83, 101-103, 110, 137-138, 142-
145, 162-165, 171, 179, 181,
183-185, 188-189
Maquimaqui, Peru, 178-179
Marcopper Mine, Phillipines, 139-
140, 165-166
Masters, John, 51-53
Mclntyre Porcupine Mines, 60, 72
McKee, Eddie, 51-53, 54
McLeod, Catherine, 174-176, 190,
192, 193-196, 198-201
280
McQuistori, Frank, 23
Menlove-Dalton Mine, CO, 59-62
metallurgy, field of, 210-211,
213
Meussig, Sig, 111, 148, 150, 155,
160, 166
Mexico, politics of, 216-217
Meyer, Charles, 97, 212
Michiquialli, Peru, 178
Miller, Julie and Leo, 49, 52
mills at mines, Aguas Calientes,
Chihuahua, MX, 28, 31-32;
Escondida, Chile, 159; San
Manuel, AZ, 105
mine safety, 21, 24, 26, 36-38,
128-129
mine surveying, 44-45, 181, 183-
185. See also mapping
Minera del Inca, 161-165
Minera Escondida, 156-158
mineral exploration/geology, 45,
63, 72, 76-85, 107-153 passim.
162-165, 184-188, 202, 209-210
mineral specimens, collecting,
23-26, 32, 173
mines, 2; Aguas Calientes,
Chihuahua, Mexico, 26-28, 30-
31; Ajo, AZ, 116; Bajo
Alumbrera, Argentina, 120, 121;
Andina, Chile, 118, 169;
Braden, Chile, 142, 169; Buena
Tierra, Chihuahua, Mexico, 25,
35-38, 44; California Cuarto,
Peru, 185; Carlin, NV, 71-72,
109; Casa Grande West, AZ, 111-
115; Cedar City, UT, 90-91;
Cerro Blanco, Chile, 118; Cerro
Colorado, Chile, 169; Cerro
Verde, Peru, 118, 170;
Chinipas, Mexico, 32; Cragmont,
BC, 139; Dizon, Philippines,
139; El Indio, Chile, 162; El
Salvador, Chile, 118, 144, 169;
El Teniente, Chile, 118, 169;
El Tesoro, Chile, 148-150, 166;
Endako, BC, 139; Far Southeast,
Philippines, 140-141;
Gibraltar, BC, 139; Idarado,
CO, 20-23, 32-33;
mines (cont d.)
Iron Springs, UT, 90-91; JA,
BC, 141-142; Kidd Creek,
Canada, 49; Lihir, Papua New
Guinea, 166; Los Lamentos,
Chihuahua, Mexico, 24-26, 32;
Madeleine, Quebec, Canada, 72;
Marcopper, Philippines, 139,
165-166; Menlove-Dalton, CO,
59-62; Mocha, Chile, 169;
Morenci Mine, AZ, 117; O okiep,
Africa, 71; Ok Tedi, Papua New
Guinea, 213-215; Palabora,
Africa, 71; Picacho, CA, 163;
Pima, AZ, 136; Quartz Hill, AK,
164; Rosemont, AZ, 108; San
Antonio, Philippines, 140, 165-
166; San Manuel, AZ, 3, 72-79,
81, 84, 95-96, 101, 105-106,
111, 210; Santa Eulalia,
Chihuahua, MX, 34-35, 38-45;
Silver Hill, AZ, 13-14;
Sorpresa, Chile, 166-167;
Stillwater, MT, 164; Tiger, AZ,
3; Twin Buttes, AZ, 108; Voisey
Bay, Newfoundland, Canada, 200.
See also Chile, Peru
Mining Engineering. 100
Mitchum, Tom, 58, 60
Mocha deposit, Chile, 169
molybdenum mining, 139, 141, 150,
183
Montoya, Luis, 172, 182
Morenci Mine, AZ, 117
Morris, Tiger, 84
Mounts, Bill, 109, 114, 144, 145
Mt. Isa Mines, 120-122
mules, 30-31, 61, 129-131
Muller, Simon Wilhelm, 55-56, 74-
75
Munk, Peter, 195
Native Americans: Apache, 6-7;
Navajo, 47, 48; Papago, 102-
105, 109; Sioux, 6; Snake, 6;
Yaqui, 7. See also Vekol
Navajo Groundwater Project, 50
281
Newmont Mining Company, 20, 70--
75, 77-82, 85, 102-106, 109-
111, 114, 115, 178, 200. See
also Idorado Mine
Nichols, Don, 114
Nigeria, mining in, 217-218
Nippon Mining Company, 139
Niugini Mining Company, 163-167,
202
North Mines, 120
O okiep, Africa, 71
Ok Tedi, Papua New Guinea, 213-
215
Ontario Securities Commission,
196
Oppenheimer, Harry, 192
Ortiz, Pancho, 146-147, 149-150,
153-154
Orzun, Jaime, 155
Outokumpu [Oy; Company] , 156
Palabora, Africa, 71
Papua New Guinea, mining in, 166,
213-215
Park, Charles, 55
Paron, Peru, 182-185
Patton, Tom, 202
Peacock, Hollis G., 66-68
Pearson, Jack, 37
Pelambres, Chile, 169
Peru, mining in, 109-110, 123-
124, 169-189, 192-194;
California Cuatro, 185; Cerro
Verde, 118, 170; Cuajone, 118,
170; Los Calatos, 94, 177-178;
Los Pinos, 174; Maquimaqui,
178-179; Michiquialli, 178;
Paron, 182-185; Pierina, 94,
109, 182, 185-189, 192-194,
197, 198, 200, 201; Quellaveco,
118, 170; Santo Domingo, Peru,
9; Santo Toribio, 185;
Taltahuantay, 178-179;
Toquepala, 118, 170; Yanacocha,
178-179
Peru, parents life in, 8-9
Peru, Quechua Indians in, 188
Peru, terrorist activity in, 94-
95, 134, 172, 179-180
Peru, visa for, 170-171
Petrina, Tony, 195
Phelps Dodge Corporation, 116,
117, 177-178
Philippine Islands, mining in,
133-136, 139-141, 165-166;
unstable political conditions
in, 133-136
phosphate deposits, NC, 49
Picacho Mine, CA, 163
Pierina, Peru, 94, 109, 182, 185-
189, 192-194, 197, 198, 200,
201
Pillar, Chuck, 210
Pillar, Lowell and Associates,
210
Pima Mine, AZ, 136
Pinochet government in Chile,
124-125, 142, 146, 211, 217
Placer Development Company (Placer
Dome), 133-134, 139-140, 156,
165-166, 195-198, 200, 210
porphyry copper deposits, 65, 71-
75, 80, 82-83, 84, 95-98, 100-
106, 113-115, 117-120, 132-134,
139-140, 150-151, 154-156, 159-
160, 169-170, 174-175, 177-179,
181, 202
prices, mineral, 64-65, 105, 106,
142, 167, 193-194, 201
Prussag Company, 152
Pudahuel Mining Company, 156, 168
Pursell, Martha, 77-81, 106
Quartz Hill, Alaska, 164
Quebrada Blanca, Chile, 118, 169
Quellaveco, Peru, 118, 170
Quintana Petroleum Company, 75-
81, 83-85, 95-96, 105-106, 110-
111
Racine, Marcia, 204, 209
Ranwick Incorporated, 58-62
Repenning, Charles, 50
282
Richard, Kenyon, 75
Riddell mucker, 67
Riddell, Paul, 67
Rio Algom Company, 120
Rio Blanco, Chile, 169
Rio Tinto Mining Company, 110,
202-203
Rio Tinto Zinc, 157
Roberts, Louie, 47
Robertson, Corbin J., 76, 80-81,
83-84
Robertson, Wilhelmina Cullen, 76,
83
Rock, Bob, 46, 51-53
Rodriguez, Lucho, 203
Rojas, Donaldo, 148-149, 153-154
Rojas, Nivaldo, 148-150
Rosemont, AZ, 108
ROTC, 16-17, 64
Ruiz, Carlos, 171
Sacaton ore body, AZ, 111, 112
Salazar, Frank, 78-79, 81
sampling. See mineral
exploration, mapping
San Antonio ore body, Philippines,
140, 165-166
San Cristobal Mine, Chile, 109,
161-164, 166
San Manuel Mine, AZ, 3, 72-79,
81, 84, 95-96, 101, 105-106,
111, 210
Santa Eulalia Mine, Chihuahua, MX,
34-35, 38-45
Santo Domingo, Peru,
Santo Toribio, Peru,
Schwartz, , 73,
Shoemaker, Robert,
213
Silver Hill Mine, AZ,
Skinner, Brian, 97
Smith, Bob, 195, 197-198
Society of Economic Geoligists
[SEG], 97-98
Sorpresa claim, Chile, 166-167
Sosie, Elwood, 47
Soto, Rigoerto, 184
9
185
79, 106
163-164, 211-
13-14
Southwest Center for Biologic
Diversity, 116
Southwest Ventures, Inc., 62-63,
65-66, 111
Spanish, fluency in, 25, 118
Stanford University, Department of
Geosciences, 51, 53-58, 62
Still, Arthur and Jack, 100
Stillwater Mine, MT, 164
Stokes, W. L., 52
Suckling, --_-, 116
Sumitomo Company, 140
Sumner, John, 138
Sutulov, Alexander, 210-211
Sykes, Godfrey (Edith s
grandfather) , 205
Syner, , 35, 42
Taltahuantay, Peru, 178-179
Tenneco, 136
Thailand, mining in, 133
Thompson, George, 55
Thompson, Ronald, 84
Thurman, Bob, 136
Tiger Mine, AZ, 3
Tonto Drilling Company, 162
Toquepala, Peru, 118, 170
Trujillo Molino, Rafael L. , 86-88
Tschichow, Nicolas, 211
Twin Buttes, AZ, 108
U.S. Borax, 70, 164, 202
Union Assay, Salt Lake City, 83,
84
United States Forest Service,
116-117
United States Geological Survey
[USGS], 50, 73-74, 97, 101,
113, 171
United States Marine Corps, 12,
15, 63-64, 138
Universidad de San Marcos, Escuela
de Minas, Peru, 92-95
University of Arizona, College of
Mines, 16-20, 23, 33-34, 45,
50-51, 53, 63-64, 88-89, 91,
93-94, 96, 116, 205-206
283
University of Minnesota, 54-55
uranium mining, 46, 51, 59-62,
66, 86-88
Utah Construction and Mining
Company [Utah International],
65-69, 70, 89-91, 105, 111,
128-129, 144-145, 150, 155-156,
160; Minero Utah, 154, 157-158
Vekol Hills ore body, AZ, 82, 85,
101-105, 109
Ventures Subsidiaries. See
Ranwick Incorporated; Southwest
Ventures, Inc.
Villa, Pancho, 40
Voisey Bay Mine, Newfoundland,
Canada, 200
Vought, Lee, 136
Wallace, Wayne, 70, 136
Walsh, David, 200
Ward, Stan, 89
Ware, Johnny, 63-64
water supply, related to mining,
31, 50, 111-113, 214
Western Mining Co., Australia,
lectures for exploration group,
98
Wheaton, Bob, 144, 160
Whittaker, Brackston, 63
World Bank, 157
World War II, 2, 12, 15, 47, 63,
132, 134, 138; Merrill s
Raiders, 47; Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, 20
Yanacocha, Peru, 178-179
Yeager, Nog, 47
YMAD, (Argentine government
entity), 120
Zaldivar deposit, Chile, 109,
144, 154-158
Eleanor Herz Swent
Born in Lead, South Dakota, where her father became chief
metallurgist for the Homestake Mining Company. Her
mother was a high school geology teacher before marriage.
Attended schools in Lead, South Dakota, Dana Hall School,
and Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Phi Beta Kappa.
M.A. in English, University of Denver. Assistant to the
President, Elmira College, New York. Married to Langan
Waterman Swent, mining engineer.
Since marriage has lived in Tayoltita, Durango, Mexico;
Lead, South Dakota; Grants, New Mexico; Piedmont,
California.
Teacher of English as a Second Language to adults in the
Oakland, California public schools. Author of an
independent oral history project, Newcomers to the East
Bay, interviews with Asian refugees and immigrants. Oral
historian for the Oakland Neighborhood History Project.
Interviewer, Regional Oral History Office since 1985,
specializing in mining history. In 1998, awarded Ll.D.
by South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
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