The Ancient Wheel Found Under a Utah Mining Town - The Ute Said It Never Stopped Turning

Forty feet below the lowest row of cabins at the upper end of Bingham Canyon, Utah, on the first bench the Utah Copper Company had cut into the mountain with steam shovels, There was a wheel of dark metal 61 feet across, lying flat in the copper ore, and on a cold Tuesday morning in October of 1906, the bucket of shovel number two came down on it and skated off. The bucket did not break it, the bucket did not dent it. The engineer, a man from Bountiful named Joseph Osler, felt the levers go slack in his hands, the way they never did in rock, and he brought the dipper back and tried a foot lower. And it skated again with a long, dry hiss. When the shovel crew climbed down and cleared the broken ore away with their hands, they found the curved top of a rim, fourteen inches wide, bending away under the bench in a long, smooth arc. It took three days to uncover the whole thing. It was a wheel, and it lay perfectly level. Twelve arms ran in from the rim, each one squared like a railroad tie, seven inches by nine, and each one twenty-five feet four inches long. They met at a hub, eight feet across, that stood two feet higher than the arms, like the drum of a giant capstan. In the centre of that hub was a square hole a little over four feet on each side, and the hole went straight down. A hundred feet of steel tape lowered into it found no bottom. On one of the twelve arms, someone had cut five short notches across the top, evenly spaced, with room left on the arm for seven more, and in a canyon where the ore stained everything it touched green and rust, the shirts of the men, the snow, the wash on the lines, the dark metal came out of the ground without a mark on it. There was no seam in it, no rivet, no weld, no line where a mould had closed. Above it lay 40 feet of hard, unbroken porphyry, the grey copper rock of the Oquirrh Mountains, in the order the Earth had made it. Nobody had buried it there. Nobody could have. Its measurements were taken by someone who was not a miner at all, a deputy United States mineral surveyor named Isser Penrose Whitlock, who happened to be on the mountain that week, with a transit and a chain, laying out the boundary of a copper claim for a government patent. He kept his field books in a way no other surveyor in Utah did. He ruled every page down the middle. On the left side, at the top, he wrote one word, seen. On the right side, he wrote another, said. What he measured with his own instruments went on the left. What other men told him went on the right. In 27 years of field books, he never let the two sides touch. for three days in october of nineteen o six the left side of his pages filled with numbers the right side filled with the words of a man who never measured anything at all he was a horse-trader from the Uinta Basin more than a hundred miles to the east who had driven seven head down through the mountains to sell at the company corrals on the evening of the second day he walked up the hall road stood at the edge of the bench and looked down at the wheel for a long time without coming closer Then he asked for the man with the instruments. Before anyone had told him a thing about what was down there, he asked Whitlock two questions. Did it have twelve arms, and was the hole in the middle square? Whitlock told him yes to both, and the horse-trader told him that the wheel was not lying there, it was going around. It went the way the sun goes, he said, slower than a cedar grows, and it had never stopped. Then he gave the surveyor three instructions. Do not put houses on it. Do not open up its arms. And when the ground says leave, leave. The horse trader was Ute. What he was telling the surveyor, in plain words, was that the whole town on that ground would one day have to move. The company put houses on it anyway. Within 50 years, the town above it was being bought up lot by lot and carried away on trucks until there was no Bingham left at all. And in the summer of 1958, a second surveyor, sent to clear the last of the cabins off that ground, found the brass-capped marker Whitlock had driven beside the notched arm half a century before. The marker had not moved. The notched arm was no longer beside it. Bingham Canyon is a crack in the eastern face of the Oquirrh Mountains, about 25 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. In 1906 it held one street, and the street was seven miles long. The canyon was so narrow in places that a wagon and a train could not pass each other, and the houses climbed the side gulches on stilts, one above the other, so that a man could step out of his back door onto his neighbor's roof. The canyon took its name from two brothers, Thomas and Sanford Bingham, who were sent by Brigham Young in 1848 to graze cattle at its mouth. They saw ore and were told to leave it alone. In 1863, soldiers from the California Volunteers at Fort Douglas, bored and a long way from the war, crossed the valley, picked up float rock in the gulches, and organized the West Mountain Mining District. For 40 years after that, Bingham was a silver and lead camp. And the copper in the mountain was mostly a nuisance. It ran at about 2%. Nobody could make money out of rock that poor. Then a young metallurgist named Daniel Jackling did the arithmetic differently. A company that did not tunnel for the rich veins, but simply took the whole mountain, carved it into steps, and loaded it into railroad cars with steam shovels, could make 2% of fortune. Jackling and his partner Enos Wall organized the Utah Copper Company in 1903. Eastern investors called the plan, Jackling's Folly. In June of 1906, the neighboring Boston Consolidated Company began stripping its own ground with a railroad steam shovel. In August, Utah Copper followed. Two companies, side by side on the same mountain, racing each other down through the rock in benches. Within four years, they would merge, and their two cuts would become one. The men who worked the benches came from everywhere. Mormon farm boys, Greeks from Crete, Japanese track gangs, Croats and Serbs from the Dalmatian coast, Italians, Finns, Irishmen, each group with its own corner of the canyon and its own coffee houses and saloons. At the very top of the canyon, above the main town, stood the cluster of cabins and boarding houses called Copperfield. Below its lowest row, the shovels of Utah copper had just begun to bite. The rock they were biting into is younger than most rock in the west, and stranger. About 38 million years ago, a mass of molten stone pushed up from deep in the earth and cooled slowly under what is now Bingham Canyon. As it cooled, it cracked into a fine web of fractures, and hot water rising from below filled every crack with a film of copper the result was a whole mountain of rock with copper spread thinly all through it nothing grows in rock like that nothing is laid down in it from above once it hardened anything sealed inside it stayed exactly where it was Long afterward, a great freshwater lake filled the valley below, the lake geologists call Bonneville. It stood against the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains for thousands of years, and drew its shorelines across their slopes like the rings in a bathtub. Then it drained and shrank, about 14,000 years ago, leaving behind the salt lake that is still there today. The Oquirrh Range itself stood on a border between peoples. To the west, in the deserts beyond it, lived the Goshute. To the east, across the Jordan River, lay Utah Valley, with its lake and its rivers full of fish, the heart of the country of the Ute bands who gave the territory, and later the state, its name. Ute families hunted, traded, and travelled across this ground for generations before any wagon came over the Wasatch. The wagons came in 1847. Within 14 years the best land in the valleys was fenced, watered and settled. And in 1861, President Lincoln signed an order setting aside the Uinta Valley, far to the east across the mountains, as a reservation. In June of 1865, at a council at Spanish Fork, Ute leaders were pressed to sign a treaty giving up their claim to the valleys in exchange for that distant basin. The Senate never ratified it. The Ute bands were moved anyway. The horse trader who stood at the edge of the bench in 1906 had made that journey as a small boy. He grew up in the Uinta Basin, near the agency at White Rocks, and he raised horses there. In August of 1905, 14 months before the wheel, the government opened the Uinta Reservation to white homesteaders, and the grazing land his family used was filed on by strangers in a single summer. That autumn he began driving horses west across the mountains to sell in Salt Lake City and in the mining camps In the ledger of the Bingham Livery he appears once without a name: Ute White Rocks, seven head. The first record of the wheel is that surveyor's field book and it survives only by accident As a Penrose, Whitlock was 47 years old in 1906. He was born in 1859 in Fillmore, in the old territorial capital, the son of Mormon pioneers who had come over the plains with a handcart company. His father laid out irrigation ditches for the farms around Fillmore with a borrowed compass and a length of knotted rope, and the boy carried the rope. At 20 he went to Salt Lake City and spent three years as a chainman for a county surveyor. Dragging a 66-foot steel chain across salt flats and sagebrush, In 1889 he was appointed a Deputy United States Mineral Surveyor, one of the men the government trusted to measure a mining claim before it could become private property. Every claim he surveyed received a number, every corner he set received a stone or a post, and every survey ended as a set of clean, signed field notes filed with the Surveyor General in Salt Lake City. where they became part of the legal record of the United States. Those clean notes were not the field book. The field book was the thing he carried in his coat, a brown canvas notebook with numbered pages written in pencil in the wind. From it, at night, he copied out what the government needed. What the government did not need stayed in the canvas book. And it was in the canvas book that he drew his line down the middle of every page. His daughter later said the habit began with a disputed corner where two honest men swore to two different places 40 feet apart. Both were wrong. In October of 1906, Whitlock was on the mountain to survey Mineral Survey No. 4417, a group of claims Utah Copper needed patented before its shovels moved any further up the slope. On the morning of Tuesday the 23rd, he was setting up his transit on the ridge above the first bench when the shovel stopped. He had already noticed something about that bench. On the left side of his page for the 20th of October, there is a small note that has nothing to do with the boundary. The ore coming up at the north end of the bench is fine as flour, it says, and some pieces show one smooth face. On the right side, beside it, is a line in the same pencil. Ostler says it has been like this a week, ground like a mill. When the shovel skated, Whitlock walked down to the bench. The shovel crew that morning was 11 men. Joseph Ostler, 39, the engineer, born in Bountiful, who had run railroad shovels on grading jobs across Utah and Nevada for 10 years. Ivan Bosnich, 30, the crane man, from a village on the Dalmatian coast. Stavros Kalogeris, 21, the fireman who fed the boiler, a Cretan from the mountains of Sfakia who had come to Bingham the year before, six pickmen, two men on the cars, above them all, the bench foreman, Daniel McAllister, 52, born in County Antrim, who had been in the canyon since the silver days. McAllister put the pickmen on the bank, first with shovels and then with bare hands. Whitlock got down on his knees among them and pressed his palm to the strip of metal they had opened. Glass smooth, he wrote, and not cold, and slippery without any wetness to it. By then the crew's hands were stained to the wrist, green from the copper and brown from the iron. Someone ran a rag over the metal. The rag turned colour. The metal did not. The first explanation he wrote down was the obvious one, and he wrote it on the left side because it was his own. A lost flywheel, perhaps, from one of the stamp mills that had come and gone in the canyon, or part of a turntable from the old narrow-gauge line. Then he looked at the face of the bench above the curve, and under the first line he added a second. No fill, no cut, forty feet of country rock, unbroken, to the grass. He drove stakes along the curve before noon, by dark with Ostler's dipper peeling the softer ore away, and the pickmen working close to the metal, the stakes had closed into most of a circle, and Whitlock had its size. Sixty-one feet, he wrote, and nothing else. What he wrote over the next two days does not read like a description. It reads like a survey, because that is what it is. Twelve stations on the rim, each one levelled with the instrument This is an instrument he used for claim corners. Twelve times the bubble settled in the middle of its vial. From one side of the circle to the other, there was no rise and no fall that his level could find. A chain run around the outside, 191 feet and some inches, the flat top of the rim, checked at every arm, 14 inches, 14 inches, 14 inches, centre of arm to centre of arm, measured along the rim, all the way around, 15 feet 11 and a half, a dozen times without a variation he could read. each arm seven inches by nine twenty-five feet four inches long and every one meeting the hub at the same angle on the blacksmith's bevel the hub sat up out of the arms like a raised drum eight feet wide and two feet high the square opening in it measured four feet two inches on each side and its edges were keen enough that none of the men would put a hand on them Whitlock fed his steel tape down into it until the last of its hundred feet had run off the reel and the brass ring at the end was still swinging free in the dark. He reeled it back. The tape was dry. The ring, which years in his pocket had scuffed to a dull brown, had come back shining as if it had been buffed on a wheel at the jeweller's. Four words went on the left side. Ring came up bright. Then the arm that was different. Of the twelve, eleven carried nothing. Across the top of the twelfth ran five shallow grooves, a foot or so apart, none deeper than a fingernail. Past the fifth, the arm was blank all the way out to the rim, long enough for seven more at the same interval. Whitlock wrote that they looked like tally marks, the kind a teamster cuts into his wagon box to count his loads. The company wanted to know what the thing was made of, and so did he. Caligorus set a cold chisel on the lip of the rim, and Bosnich brought an eight-pound sledge down on it. The chisel's edge curled back like a lead seal. A second chisel split. A hand drill went blunt inside a minute, and the only mark it made was a small bright patch that dulled again while they stood there. The one sample anyone managed to take did not come off the wheel at all. Along one side of every arm, the ore had been worn to powder, and the powder was flecked with black grit. Whitlock scraped a spoonful into a glass vial, sealed the stopper with wax, and wrote Sample 17 on the label. It went down the canyon on the morning ore train, addressed to an assayer in Salt Lake City. That afternoon, Bosnich tipped a dipper of drinking water over the rim to rinse it. The water would not lie on the metal. It pulled itself up at once into small hard drops, like quicksilver spilled on a table, and the drops began to move. The rim was level. Whitlock had just finished proving it. The drops moved anyway, all of them the same way, sliding along the curve until they fell off its edge. Bosnich emptied a second dipper to be sure of it. Whitlock wrote, Water runs with the sun. He had a thermometer in his kit for correcting the length of his chain in heat and cold. Ten minutes on the bare ore beside the rim gave him forty-four degrees. Ten minutes on the rim gave fifty-six. The bench was in shadow until noon and the morning had been frosty and the metal was 12 degrees warmer than the rock it lay in. When he set the transit over the hub, its compass needle drifted four degrees east of north and settled, pointing at the square opening. He sent to the shop for a horseshoe magnet. It would not cling to the rim, and it would not so much as tug toward it. Whitlock entered the needle and the magnet together, one after the other, on a single line of the left column, and let them stand side by side without comment. From the hub he shot a bearing on the arm with the notches, north 23 degrees east. He chalked a big figure one on the rim next to it and numbered the rest, two to twelve, following the circle the way the sun crosses the sky, east, then south, then west. Then, a step outside the rim beside arm one, he drove a two-foot length of iron pipe into the oar and fixed a brass cap on top. Into the cap he stamped the survey number, 4417, his initials, the year, and two more words. Spoke one. It was only after all of that, walking the circle one last time, that he saw what the ore had been doing. On one side of each arm, the rock was ground down hard and glossy, like a whetstone, with a little bank of black dust heaped against it. On the other side of each arm, the ore was rough and broken, exactly as the shovel had left it. It was the same side every time. It was the side that faced the way he had numbered the arms, the way the sun goes. Caligaris looked at it for a long time, and then said something that Whitlock put on the right side of the page, in quotation marks. My father's press stone looked like that, where the olives went under it. On the left, at the foot of the page, Whitlock wrote one line and drew two lines under it. Ground on one side only. Wear comes from movement. A thing that has lain still for a very long time is worn evenly, or not at all. The right side of those pages belongs almost entirely to one man. The horse trader came up the hall road at sundown on Wednesday, the 24th of October, after the shovel had shut down for the night. Whitlock described him the way he described every stranger who appeared in his field books, in a single line, a man of about forty in a wool coat and a flat-brimmed hat, with a braid down his back, quiet, his English slow and exact. He gave no name. Whitlock did not ask for one, and he later regretted it in a note on the inside cover of the book. The horse-trader stood on the lip of the bench for some time, looking down at the wheel in the last of the light. Then he asked for the man with the instruments, and when Whitlock came up the ladder, he asked his two questions. Whitlock wrote them in quotation marks. Has it got twelve arms? Is the hole in the middle four-cornered? To the first, Whitlock said yes. To the second, he said yes. He noted that the man showed no surprise at either answer. He nodded at each one, as if he were checking it against something he already knew. Then the horse-trader said five things, and Whitlock, who numbered everything, numbered them. 1. It is not lying there, it is going around. 2. It goes the way the sun goes. 3. Slower than a cedar puts on wood, it has never stopped. 4. Whoever lives on it has to get off it, every house. 5. It is for counting, not for carrying. under the fifth on the right side of the page Whitlock wrote two words not understood then came the three instructions and they too went on the right don't put houses on it don't open its arms when the ground says leave leave the horse-trader turned and walked back down the hall road toward the corrals in the dark And here, for the only time in twenty-seven years of field books, Asa Whitlock broke his own rule. Below the horse-trader's words, he drew a single line straight across the page, through the ruled centre, from the left margin to the right. Across both columns, in a hand that his niece would later say was larger than his usual hand, he wrote questions one and two, put before he was told. Answers agree with Chain. He had measured twelve arms. He had measured a square hole. A man who had never been down on the bench had asked about both before anyone had said a word to him. The surveyor had no column for that. So he wrote it across the middle. On Thursday the 25th, shovel number two stood cold all day. The pay sheet for that date is still in the company's books. The north end of the first bench shows nothing loaded and nothing moved, and every one of Ostler's eleven men drew a full day's wages. In the margin are two initials and a surname cut short, D. McKay, and no reason given. The horse-trader returned at midday, and this time he climbed down. Talk on the bench died away as he crossed the broken oar to the rim. He knelt, pulled off his right glove, and set his bare hand flat on the metal, and after that he was still. Whitlock opened his watch. Nobody told the crew to do anything. Osler's hat came off first, and then Bosnich's, and then McAllister's, and after that the rest. Calogerus made the sign of the cross the Greek way, right shoulder before left. In the quiet, the shovel's boiler could be heard ticking as it lost its heat, and from up the slope near the copperfield cabins came two barks from a dog, and then nothing. Nine minutes passed on the surveyor's watch. Then the horse-trader lifted his hand, drew his glove back on, got to his feet, and spoke in a low voice. On the right side of the page, it is awake, a pause, and then, It went a little, under my hand. Whitlock knelt where the other man had knelt, and laid his own hand in the same place. On the left side, he recorded warmth and nothing besides. Osler did the same, and McAllister. Whatever they felt, neither of them put it on paper, and nobody thought to ask. As the horse trader started up the ladder, Whitlock called after him, and asked once more about the last of his five sayings. The reply did not change by a word. Whitlock entered it a second time on the right, and underlined it. it is for counting not for carrying and next to it once more not understood the horse trader collected the money for his seven horses that afternoon and rode out of the canyon the surveyor never met him again friday brought the timber against the first bench the supply ledger charges thirty squared timbers twelve inches by twelve thirty six bales of hay and one length of pipe with a brass cap already in the ground. The crew laid the timbers edge to edge across the wheel and spread the hay on top of them. Shovel number two pushed waste rock back into the hollow until it was level with the bench and then crawled off to work the south end. Under a skin of loose rock the brass cap stamped. Spoke one waited for the first surveyor's rod to find it. Up the slope the Copperfield cabins stood exactly where they had stood the week before. The company's own record of those four days is one sentence long. Each Saturday, the Bingham superintendent sent his figures down the canyon to the general office in Salt Lake City. His sheet for the week that ended on the 27th of October fills three pages. Cubic yards of waste, tons of ore, coal burned under the boilers, two men injured on the cars. the wheel gets one line number one bench north end shovel met a boulder of hard dark porphyry not workable with the dipper same covered over and shovel shifted to south end before doubting that line it is fair to see how reasonable it is bingham ore was never uniform the porphyry was shot through with dykes of harder rock and with masses of barren stone that miners on every range called horses because they stood in the ore like an animal standing in a field A shovel could hit one, slide off it, and lose half a morning digging around it. On a mountain the size of the one Utah copper was carving, that happened every week. Hard rock in strange shapes is ordinary in a mine. There is a second sensible answer, and Whitlock wrote it himself on the first morning. Bingham Canyon by 1906 was littered with the iron of forty years of mining. Stamp mills had been built and abandoned, narrow gauge tracks had been laid and torn up, railroads turned their engines on turntables, great iron wheels laid flat in round pits with a pivot in the middle, a lost turntable, a buried flywheel, a broken piece of some forgotten machine. Those were real things, and the canyon was full of them. What the report leaves out is harder to set aside, and the first thing it leaves out is the rock above. A turntable is not found under 40 feet of unbroken porphyry, and a flywheel is not sealed inside a mountain that hardened 38 million years ago. Nobody laid any machine down there. There was no way down. Then there is the geometry. Boulders are not built with 12 arms set the same distance apart all the way around. They are not level from edge to edge across 61 feet. Chisels do not curl on them and they are not 12 degrees warmer than the rock that holds them. And the third is the assay. The reply on sample 17 came back from Salt Lake City, nine days after it left, and Whitlock pinned it into his field book. Not copper, not iron, will not flux. Return for instructions. The superintendent's weekly report never mentions it. No later report mentions it either. There is also a smaller problem with the boulder, and it is the timber. Worthless rock is blasted, or shoveled around and forgotten. Hay and squared timber are the materials of protection. What a careful man spreads over ground he expects to open again. The silence needs no plot to explain it. In the autumn of 1906, Utah copper was barely three years old, and nothing had yet been proved. Eastern bankers had been told that a mountain of 2% ore could be made to pay. Boston Consolidated was stripping the ground next door and would have liked nothing better than a rumor that Jackling's men were wasting their time. The company's patent survey, Whitlock's survey, was still open in the government's books. and there were eleven men on the first bench who had watched a brass ring come up polished out of a hole with no bottom in a camp full of miners from a dozen countries each with his own name for the things that live in the dark of a mine in that position a report about something nobody could name was a report nobody was going to write the shovel moved south on the official side the trail ends cleanly in december of 1906 Whitlock delivered his signed field notes for Mineral Survey 4417 to the Surveyor General. They describe the claim boundaries, the cornerstones, the bearings to the canyon landmarks, all in his neat government hand. They do not describe a wheel. There is only one line in them that a careful reader would stop on. At one corner, beside the bearing to an auxiliary point, At this point he wrote, Aux, PT set, brass cap, see private notes. Nobody at the Surveyor General's office ever asked to see his private notes. 33 years later, the same voice was written down a second time, by someone who had never heard of Asa Whitlock. During the Depression, the Federal Works Progress Administration hired writers, teachers, and anyone who could type to gather local history. And in Utah, the program went by the name of the Utah Writers Project. In August of 1939, one of its field workers was a young woman named Ruth Ingebretson, 27 years old, born in Magna, at the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains, where her father worked the night shift at the Utah Copper Mill. She was sent to the Uinta Basin to collect notes on the cattle and horse trade and she spent two weeks driving between ranches and the agency towns. Every night she typed her notes in three copies. One carbon of them survives At White Rocks, she was told to see an old man who had raised horses there for 60 years. He was about 71. He agreed to talk on one condition, that she not write down his name, and she kept her word. In her notes, he is only the old man at White Rocks who sold horses at Bingham. His granddaughter, who taught at the agency school, translated, For most of an afternoon they talked about horses, about prices at the Salt Lake Stockyards, about the bad winter of 1899. Ruth's notes on those subjects are long and practical. Then, near the end, the old man asked her a question of his own. He wanted to know where she was from. When she said Magna, he wanted to know whether the houses at the top of Bingham Canyon were still standing Ruth answered that most were though the company had begun buying lots and people in Magna said the pit would have the whole canyon in the end the old man nodded, she wrote, and made a brief reply and the granddaughter hesitated before putting it into English. Not all of them yet the ground up there he said had its own name among his people. Ruth attempted the word, crossed it out and noted that her spelling was not equal to it in English the granddaughter gave it as where the ground goes around when Ruth asked which ground he meant, his hands stayed in his lap. He turned his face toward the mountains in the west and lifted his chin once and that was all the direction he gave a moment later the hands did come up, every finger spread ten. He folded them shut and then showed two fingers more what came next Ruth set down as a short list without numbers in the granddaughter's English: older than the big water in the valley Flat as the lake at sunrise. Dirt will not stay on it. When the water rose against the mountains and went down again, it went on turning underneath. Left behind by the people from before, who did not carry it off because they had not finished with it. Given to the people to keep an eye on, not to make use of. No one to live over it, since anyone living on a turning thing will have to move. No fire on that ground. No digging below the dark rock. No pointing. Ruth's next question was the obvious one. What was it counting? For a long while, she wrote, he said nothing. His granddaughter leaned toward him and asked something, and he talked to her for some time, quietly. When she turned back, she told Ruth that this part was for the people, and not for anyone outside them. Ruth rolled the carbon up in her typewriter that night, and closed the page with one line, withheld at the request of the informant. What the wheel was counting is not in her notes, and it is not part of this record either. Ute life has long been arranged around circles and seasons. Every spring, Ute communities still gather for the bear dance, one of the oldest Ute ceremonies held inside a great round enclosure of brush and branches to mark the waking of the bear from its winter sleep and the turning of the year. It is a public ceremony and it is still danced today. Nothing in it describes a wheel of metal, but a people who mark the year by what wakes and what turns would know exactly what it means to call something a thing for counting. Whitlock died in Salt Lake City in 1921, and never read Ruth Ingebretson's notes. Ruth never saw Whitlock's field book. The old man at White Rocks could read neither of them. Laid out the way the surveyor laid out his own pages, the two records fall into his two columns almost by themselves. On the left, seen, twelve arms, counted one by one, spaced alike to the half-inch On the right, said, ten fingers, closed, and two more. Seen, a square hole four feet two inches on a side, said in 1906 by a man who had not yet been down on the bench, is it four-cornered. Seen, all ground smooth on one side of every arm, the side facing the way the sun goes, said, it goes the way the sun goes. seen a rag stained green and brown a rim wiped clean said in 1939 to Ruth dirt will not stay on it seen a hundred feet of tape into the hole and no bottom said no digging below the dark rock seen a rim level across 61 feet said flat as the lake at sunrise Whitlock never ruled a third column for coincidence but this comparison needs one In it go the gaps and the easy matches. No size appears anywhere in what the old man said. No lake appears anywhere in Whitlock's book. Any turning thing has a fifty-fifty chance of turning with the sun. Anyone imagining a wheel would give it a hole at the centre, and square is not a wild guess for the shape. Twelve is the number of months, and of hours on a clock face. Any single match can be put in the third column. What cannot is that all of them came out of one man, first in 1906, and then again, unprompted, in 1939. By then, the town above the wheel had already begun to leave. Utah Copper had become part of the Kennecott Copper Corporation in 1936, and Bingham had become one of the great copper mines of the world, its pit one of the largest man-made excavations on earth. Its benches had climbed over ridges and swallowed gulches, and by the 1950s, the richest ore left in the mountain lay directly under Bingham itself, under the boarding houses, the stores, the churches, and the cabins of Copperfield. In 1956, Kennecott began selling the company houses to the men who lived in them, on the understanding that they would be moved. Families jacked their homes onto trucks and drove them down the canyon to Coppertown, to Magna, to the new subdivisions in the valley. By 1960, Copperfield and the camp at Highland Boy were gone. The last buildings in Bingham were torn down in 1972. A town of thousands simply drove away. No lot could be handed to the shovels until its lines had been run again. In the summer of 1958, the man running them at the upper end of the canyon was Donald Kimura, a mine surveyor for Kennecott's Utah Copper Division. He was 34, and he had been born in Bingham in 1924 in the canyon's Japanese camp, where his father worked as a trackman on the Bingham and Garfield line. He had studied mining engineering at the University of Utah and graduated in 1950. He had never heard of Asa Whitlock. His rodman, carrying the leveling rod and the chain, was a 20-year-old from Copperton named Gary Peterson, who kept a small pocket notebook of his own. Before the lots at the upper end of Copperfield could be released, Kimura needed the old claim lines, and for that he went to the original government notes for Mineral Survey 4417, filed half a century before in the Surveyor General's records. He found Whitlock's corners and his bearings. He also found the line no one had ever followed. Oak stock PT, set, brass cap, see private notes. There were no private notes in the file. So Kimura did what a surveyor does, with a bearing and a distance. He ran them out on the ground. They brought him to an empty lot where a boarding house had stood until that spring. He probed the dirt with a steel rod, and two feet down the rod rang on brass. The cap was green with age, but the stamping was clear. 44417. The initials APW. The year 1906. In two words. Spoke one. he had the dozer strip the lot with care under the fill he found rotten timbers squared twelve inches by twelve lying side by side and under the timbers a mat of black hay under the hay was the rim kimura spent eight days on it he did not know he was repeating anything sixty-one feet across twelve arms fifteen feet eleven and a half inches between them at the rim an opening in the hub four feet two inches square Five grooves on one arm, space for seven more. Not one of his figures differed from Whitlock's, and he had no way to know it. The canvas notebook with the same numbers had been shut in a trunk for thirty-seven years. Whitlock's chalk had survived. Fifty-two years under timber and hay had kept the rain off it, and though the figures were almost gone, Kimura could make them out with his cheek nearly against the metal. One, two, three, and on to twelve, running east, then south, then west around the rim. his transits compass set up over the hub pulled four degrees off and pointed at the opening a magnet from the truck would not stick to the rim he put the two observations on one line of his book as the man who had stamped the cap had done half a century before him then he went back to the cap nothing about it had changed it stood upright in awe no one had ever disturbed a step outside the rim but the chalk on the arm beside it was not a one it was an eleven Arm 1, the arm with the grooves, was two arms further on, the way the sun goes. Kimura stretched his chain from the cap to the middle of it, 31 feet 11 inches, two full spaces. He set up over the hub again and read the bearing to the grooved arm. North 83 degrees east. The bearing Whitlock had read from that same hub. North 23 degrees east. Was sitting in a notebook. Kimura would never see. 60 degrees separates the two readings. On a wheel of 12 arms. 60 degrees is two arms. One more thing had grown. The black dust banked against the sunward face of every arm. A thin bank in 1906. Was now heaped up as high as a man's hand is broad. Kimura did the arithmetic on the back of a page. Two spaces in 52 years came to a little more than 7 inches a year, and at that pace the wheel would need something over 300 years to come all the way around. Underneath, he started a second calculation. How many times it might have turned since the porphyry closed over it 38 million years ago. He stopped halfway through the line and wrote under it, Assumes constant rate. No basis for that. That night he wrote a short memo to the division engineer, and Peterson copied it word for word into his own notebook. Old timbered structure found under Copperfield lot. Survey cap 4417. In place. Request instructions. By the next morning the reply had come back, and it was four words long. Continue clearing. Release lots. Beside the two bearings in his field book, in pencil, Kimura added a note. in thirty years of his books it is the only sentence that is not a measurement the cap is where he left it the arms are not the hollow was filled in once more on the division's pit map for 1959 there is a small circle on that lot shaded with fine diagonal lines withhold do not strip lettered beside it in capitals for a few years the benches were cut around it That same year, Kimura put in for a transfer to Kennecott's Ray Mine in Arizona, and it was granted. He died in 1991. Every field book he kept after 1959 is from Arizona, and none of them mentions Utah. The records of the wheel were never burned or stolen. They were catalogued, carefully, each one under the wrong heading. Whitlock's canvas field books stayed in his family after he died, In 1966, when his daughter's house in Salt Lake City was emptied, they were sold at auction as one lot, described in the catalogue as Surveyor's Field Books, six volumes. A dealer bought them for $11 and resold them to a university library, where a cataloguer opened the first volume, found the elder Whitlock's irrigation ditches mixed in among the son's mining claims, and filed all six under Fillmore Irrigation Surveys. The 1906 volume, with its line drawn across the middle of the page, has sat in that folder ever since. Sample 17 came back once. In 1961, an old assay office in Salt Lake City that had tested ore for the Bingham companies since the 1890s closed its doors, and its shelves of stored samples were listed before they were thrown away. Whitlock's vial was there, with his label in faded pencil. The inventory gives it one line. Vial empty. Stopper in place. Wax seal whole. Ruth Ingebretson's Carbon went with the rest of the Utah Writers' Project papers to the state's historical collections. Her two weeks in the Uinta Basin were boxed as one folder and labeled Livestock, Uinta Basin. The page about the ground that goes around sits between a page on horse prices and a page on winter feed. Kimura's 1958 book is in the Kennecott Survey Records, and anyone who counts its numbered pages will come up six short. 18 to 23 are gone, taken out with scissors in a clean line close to the stitching. The 7-inch arithmetic and the pencilled sentence about the cap exist today only as copies in the pocket notebook Gary Peterson took home and kept. Peterson stayed with Kennecott for 38 years. In 2004, at 66, he sat down with a volunteer from a county historical society who was recording the memories of men who had helped clear Bingham. He talked for most of an hour about the trucks and the houses rolling down the canyon road with curtains still in the windows. Near the end, the volunteer asked whether anything had stayed with him from those years. Peterson was quiet for a while. Then he said one sentence, and it is the last thing on the tape. We got every house off that ground, and I still don't know if we got them far enough. The tape is in one collection. Whitlock's book is in another. Kimura's figures survive in a Rodman's pocket notebook. Ruth's page is filed under livestock. They have never once been in the same room. There is a version of all this that ends in ordinary things, and it deserves its strongest form. Porphyry throws up hard, strange shapes, and miners working by hand under a deadline were not trained to read them. Copper Country is full of magnetite, enough to swing a needle by itself. Whitlock's book was handled by his family for 45 years before any archive saw it. Ruth Ingebretson grew up in Magna, in the shadow of the mill, and may well have heard rumours about the upper bench before she ever met the old man. And questions shape answers, and translation shapes them more. Caligaris was thinking of his father's press. The men took their hats off because a man was kneeling. Not because anything moved. Every one of those objections is fair. The trouble is that each disposes of one record and leaves the others where they were. Magnetite swings a needle, but it does not explain a metal a magnet will not touch. A strange shape in porphyry does not come in twelve arms spaced to the half inch. A family's handling of a notebook does not explain Kimura, who never saw it, writing down the same figures fifty-two years later. and a leading question in 1939 does not explain a horse trader who in 1906 asked about the shape of the opening in the hub before anyone had told him the wheel had a hub at all a single drill hole into the hatched circle on the nineteen fifty nine map would have answered most of it in a day the division drilled on every side of that circle in the years that followed not inside it the Ute are still here The Ute Indian tribe of the Uinta and Oray Reservation holds land across the Uinta Basin, and every spring the bear dance is still held there inside its great ring of brush. What the wheel counts, if it counts anything, is theirs to say. The first bench of the Utah Copper Company is gone, The pit that began below the lowest row of Copperfield cabins is now nearly three-quarters of a mile deep, and more than two miles across, and the ground where the shovel skated in 1906 is somewhere in the open air above it. After 1964, the hatched circle no longer appears on the division's maps. No surviving record says whether the benches finally went through it, or around it and down. If your family lived in Copperfield or Highland Boy, if a house you grew up in rode down Bingham Canyon on the back of a truck, and you have an old lot plat, a claim survey, or a field book from that ground that is yours to give, put it in the comments and keep following these files, Because one page from a family drawer can close a gap no archive can. In 1906 a brass cap stood beside Arm 1, in 1958 it stood beside Arm 11, five notches were cut and seven were left open.