Ore and Empire: Conquistadors to Guggenheims on the Camino Real

Photography and the history of extraction combine as Marty Stupich's extraordinary images map the 600 year oppression of the lands and people from the Mexican Conquest to the Guggenheims, from deep inside present-day Mexico to southern Wyoming. For centuries the Spanish Empire’s conscripted laborers extracted silver from hand-dug tunnels and shafts deep beneath the mountain spine of the Americas.By the late nineteenth century, mining engineers in the United States and in Mexico were refining not just silver ores but also lead, gold, and copper. Copper was especially crucial to the looming industrial century.Not since the days when Spanish treasure galleons carried off the New World’s silver had anyone seen the sort of vast mineral wealth amassed by the “copper kings” of the Gilded Age.First among them was the Guggenheim family, whose American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) controlled more than 80 percent of the world’s supply of silver, copper, and lead by the early twentieth c