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ABSTRACT
This article rhetorically investigates a missing mining report known as the Jackling-Gemmell Report. Supposedly published in September 1899, this report was the first to scientifically rationalize porphyry, or open-pit, mining methods. Based on my analysis of thousands of archival records at Stanford University’s Daniel Jackling Collection, I argue that this textual absence is sutured by the rhetorical presence of mythopoeia wherein Daniel Jackling has become mythologized as the alchemist that transformed useless rock (i.e., mountains) into pure copper for modern technology. In my analysis of relevant books, letters, and reports, I complicate the textual agency of this alleged report and show how Jackling himself created a powerful public persona as a prophetic hero that predicted the commercial success of porphyry mining. I offer the concept alchemical rhetoric to emphasize how rhetors and rhetoricians create different meanings, identities, and realities from rhetorical resources within an extractive worldview.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank both anonymous reviewers as well as Emma Bloomfield and John Ferré for their helpful feedback in the development of this essay. The author is also grateful for the research assistance from archivists and librarians in Special Collections at the University of Utah and Stanford University libraries. Travel for this research was made possible by a small research grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Louisville.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 A.B. Parsons, The Porphyry Coppers (American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1933), 45.
2 In T.A. Rickard, The Utah Copper Enterprise (Mining and Scientific Press, 1919), 40.
3 Isaac Frederick Marcosson, Metal Magic: The Story of the American Smelting and Refining Company (Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949).
4 Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth,” Communications Monographs 50, no. 1 (1983): 14–32; Leroy Dorsey, “The Frontier Myth in Presidential Rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt’s Campaign for Conservation,” Western Journal of Communication 59, no. 1 (1995): 1–19; Robert Rowland, “On Mythic Criticism,” Communication Studies 41, no. 2 (1990): 101–16.
5 Leah Ceccarelli, On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
6 E. Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2022).
7 This is not dissimilar from how other speakers during this time, such as Theodore Roosevelt, invoked expansionist rhetoric in the name of what Warren Cook calls, the “progressive ‘public interest.’” To Cook, Roosevelt used water conservation as an extractive tool for colonization in his 1901 First Annual Message. Warren Cook, “Articulating Water Conservation as Colonization: Revisiting the ‘Public Interest’ in Theodore Roosevelt’s First Annual Message,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (2024): 1–23.
8 Davis Houck, “On or about June 1988,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 135–7.
9 Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2019), 4. In tracing the history of the transcontinental railroad and Indigenous dispossession within the colonial archives, Karuka shows how settler colonial rumors of “countersovereignty” became “the foundation of a set of policies, of a way of acting, couched in invasion and occupation.” Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 6.
10 Erle Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2018).
11 Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 4 (2011): 375.
12 Joshua Trey Barnett, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022).
13 Joshua Trey Barnett, “Rhetoric for Earthly Coexistence: Imagining an Ecocentric Rhetoric,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 367.
14 Philip Tschirhart and Emma Frances Bloomfield, “Framing the Anthropocene as Influence or Impact: The Importance of Interdisciplinary Contributions to Stratigraphic Classification,” Environmental Communication 14, no. 5 (2020): 698–711. See Cook, “Articulating Water Conservation as Colonization.”
15 Barbara Biesecker, “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 124.
16 Biesecker, “Of Historicity, Rhetoric,” 124.
17 Houck, “June 1988,” 134.
18 Charles Morris III, “Archival Queer,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 146.
19 See Roland De Wolk, American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2019).
20 Address by Wallace Sterling, in Proceedings of the Presentation and Unveiling of the Statue of Daniel Cowan Jackling, Salt Lake City (Sons of Utah Pioneers, August 14, 1954), 38.
21 Cara Finnegan, “What Is This a Picture of? Some Thoughts on Images and Archives,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 116–23. For additional critique of Stanford’s colonial archives, see Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 82–103.
22 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Hill and Wang, 2013), 113.
23 Janice Hocker Rushing, “Evolution of ‘The New Frontier’ in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-optation of the Feminine Archetype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75, no. 1 (1989): 2.
24 Cram, Violent Inheritance, 35. See Ceccarelli, Frontier of Science; Dorsey, “Frontier Myth.”
25 Mary Stuckey, “The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14, no. 2 (2011): 229–60.
26 Cram, Violent Inheritance, 34.
27 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
28 Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones, rev. ed. (Penguin, 2004), 29, 30, 31.
29 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium (Prometheus Books, 1991), 95.
30 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Jowett, Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium, 79.
31 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Jowett, Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium, 79.
32 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Jowett, Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium, 91.
33 See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, ed. and trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–156.
34 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 59.
35 Robin Jensen, “Theorizing Chemical Rhetoric: Toward an Articulation of Chemistry as a Public Vocabulary,” Journal of Communication 71, no. 3 (2021): 14–15.
36 Jensen, “Theorizing Chemical Rhetoric,” 14–15. For more on the uses of chemical rhetoric see Robin Jensen, “Improving upon Nature: The Rhetorical Ecology of Chemical Language, Reproductive Endocrinology, and the Medicalization of Infertility,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 2 (2015): 329–53; Robin Jensen, Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016).
37 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper, 2006).
38 Joshua Gunn and Thomas Frentz, “The Da Vinci Code as Alchemical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 72, no. 3 (2008): 213–38.
39 See Nicholas Paliewicz, “Arguments of Green Colonialism: A Post-Dialectical Reading of Extractivism in the Americas,” Argumentation and Advocacy 58, no. 3–4 (2022): 232–48.
40 Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 160.
41 Houck, “About 1988.”
42 Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 22.
43 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
44 Marx himself tends to stir metaphors of alchemy when he wonders in the first several chapters regarding how commodities get their value. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Penguin UK, 2004).
45 In Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, ix.
46 Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise, 25. Leonard J. Arrington and Gary B. Hansen, The Richest Hole on Earth: The History of the Bingham Canyon Mine (Monograph Series Utah State University, 1963).
47 “His Name was Daniel Jackling, ‘The Father of Porphyry Mining,’” Chinorama, Fourth Quarter 1969, p. 7, Box 6, Folder 6, Wilbur H. Smith Papers, Marriott Utah Library.
48 That is, Kenneth Krahulec, “History and Production of the West Mountain (Bingham) Mining District, Utah,” in Geology and Ore Deposits of the Oquirrh and Wasatch Mountains, Utah (Society of Economic Geologists Guidebook Series, 1997), 189–217; Ronald C. Brown, “Daniel C. Jackling and Kennecott: A Mining Entrepreneur’s Adjustment to Corporate Bureaucracy,” The Mining History Journal 10 (2003): 133–42.
49 Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise; Parsons, The Porphyry Coppers. Also see A.B. Parsons, The Porphyry Coppers in 1956 (American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, 1957).
50 Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 53.
51 Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 52, 54.
52 Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 62.
53 Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise, 18.
54 While these samplings and locations are written on the original map, he writes “they would have been illegible when the map was reduced to the size of one of our pages.” Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise, 18.
55 Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise, 24.
56 For more on these kinds of epistemological and metaphysical problems with signature see Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 278–93.
57 H.A. Cohen Report (June 1, 1898), M0093, Box 43, Folder 4, Stanford Special Collection.
58 Clement Report to De Lamar (February 2, 1899), Box 43, Folder 4.
59 Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 51–2.
60 Clement Report to De Lamar (May 9, 1899).
61 Rickard, Utah Copper, 18. According to a letter to Hinsdill Parsons, attorney for General Electric, the deal was ¼ interest with ½ interest for $500,000 with the remaining ¼ for “working capital.” This contrasts with the $250,000 indicated by most secondary sources. Letter to Parsons (November 18, 1899), Box 43, Folder 4.
62 Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 53.
63 Cohen Letter to Parsons (October 27, 1899), Box 43, Folder 4.
64 Letter to Parsons (November 11, 1899).
65 Letter to Parsons (November 18, 1899). The rest of the letter is removed from archival record.
66 Parsons Letter to Coffin (November 20, 1899), Box 43, Folder 4.
67 Parsons Letter to Coffin (November 20, 1899).
68 Parsons Letter to Whittemore (November 23, 1899), Box 43, Folder 4.
69 Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise, 26.
70 Charles Morris III, “The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies; Or, the Archive’s rhetorical (Re)turn,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 113–15.
71 Rickard, Utah Copper Enterprise, 27.
72 In later years, Kennecott recasted this narrative in pamphlets circulated on the 50th Anniversary of the Utah Copper Company. “50th Anniversary: The Utah Copper Story,” Box 80, Folder 10.
73 “50th Anniversary: The Utah Copper Story,” Box 80, Folder 10.
74 Brown, “Daniel C. Jackling,” 137.
75 Stoler, Archival Grain, 3.
76 “Wall vs. Utah Copper,” Mines and Methods, December 1911, 357.
77 Letter to Horace Dunbar (September 24, 1947), Box 20, Folder 5.
78 Letter to Horace Dunbar (September 24, 1947), Box 20, Folder 5.
79 Letter to Harry Walker (May 20, 1949), Box 24, Folder 6 (emphasis added).
80 Letter to Marie Sasselli (September 3, 1953), Box 24, Folder 6.
81 The work is an unpublished monograph called Big Men and Big Fortunes. See Box 80, Folder 2.
82 Letter to Horace Dunbar (September 24, 1947), Box 20, Folder 5.
83 Letter to Horace Dunbar (September 11, 1946).
84 Letter to Horace Dunbar (September 11, 1946) (emphasis added).
85 Letter to Horace Dunbar (September 11, 1946).
86 Letter to Dunbar (September 24, 1947).
87 Letter to Dunbar (September 11, 1946). Response to Dunbar (August 18, 1956), Box 20, Folder 5 (emphasis added).
88 Letter to Dunbar (September 11, 1946). Response to Dunbar (August 18, 1956).
89 Letter to Dunbar (September 11, 1946). Response to Dunbar (August 18, 1956).
90 Letter to Dunbar (March 5, 1951), Box 20, Folder 4.
91 Kennecott Copper Advertisement, Deseret News (February 14, 1952), Box 23, Folder 2.
92 Kennecott Copper Advertisement, Deseret News (February 14, 1952), Box 23, Folder 2.
93 This narrative, and its monopolization of the public good, is prescient of the hegemonic neoliberal discourses that would fully emerge years later.
94 Otto Cherdron Letter to Jackling (July 13, 1946), Box 20, Folder 3.
95 Clipping from New York Sun (November 24, 1937), Box 47, Folder 2.
96 Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 114.
97 Daniel C. Jackling Biography (March 6, 1911), Advance Press Service, Box 80, Folder 1.
98 Letter to Clarence Justheim (February 20, 1939), Box 80, Folder 1. Also included is a note from Justheim urging Jackling to consider a film he wrote registered “Copper King” and “The Eighth Wonder” that would include “some fiction and romance interwoven.” Note to Jackling (February 26, 1939).
99 Letter to C.C. Parsons (November 12, 1945), Box 20, Folder 3.
100 Letter to C.C. Parsons (November 12, 1945), Box 20, Folder 3.
101 Letter to Belle Gemmell (July 12, 1943), Box 47, Folder 4.
102 Letter to Belle Gemmell (May 14, 1943), Box 47, Folder 4.
103 Letter to Belle Gemmell (May 14, 1943).
104 Rio Tinto Revenue 2010–2023, Macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RIO/rio-tinto/revenue.
105 Jackling himself once said that “of course, the public has been the greatest beneficiary in these magnificently successful undertakings” in a memorandum regarding a book about porphyry coppers. Memorandum to Mr. Wilson (July 1, 1937), Box 47, Folder 2.
106 John Boutwell Letter to Jackling (August 26, 1954), Box 20, Folder 2.
107 Charles R. Cox, “In Proceedings of the Presentation and Unveiling of the Statue of Daniel Cowan Jackling, Salt Lake City” (Sons of Utah Pioneers, August 14, 1954), 32.
108 Statue of Daniel Cowen, 32.
109 LeCain, Mass Destruction, 7.
110 Barnett, “Earthly Coexistence.”
111 Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51.
112 LeCain, Mass Destruction.