Life In the Desert

Two years ago the San Pedro Valley desert east of Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains was inhabited by little more than coyotes and cactus. But after Magma Copper Co. proved up the nation's biggest copper deposit beneath the San Pedro Valley floor, the face of the desert changed. Earth movers terraced the rimrock into 1,500 homesites, bulldozers crunched over thousands of acres to carve out winding avenues, parks, shopping centers, a community swimming pool for the new town of San Manuel (TIME COLOR PAGES, July 25). To house Magma's workers. Builder Del Webb put house construction on a 29-day foundation-to-finish schedule, moved in ten new families daily. Working three shifts, seven days a week, some 2,500 construction workers fitted together a $43 million ore-crushing mill and smelter. Across the rugged hills more workers laid out a 4,200-ft. landing strip, a new highway, a 30-mile, $7,500,000 railroad to the Southern Pacific's spur at Hayden. Last week, six months ahead of schedule, the first trickle of molten copper came out of the huge San Manuel smelter.

When San Manuel hits full production, perhaps by midsummer, it will process 30,000 tons of ore daily and yield 70,000 tons of copper yearly, plus 3.000 tons of molybdenum as a byproduct. Thus Magma, which has only one other smelter (at Superior, Ariz.), will boost its total copper production to almost 100,000 tons yearly, jump from sixth to third place among U.S. producers (after Kennecott and Phelps Dodge). At peak production San Manuel will expand U.S. copper output by 8%, molybdenum by 16%.

To get San Manuel into operation, the Government gave Magma a strong helping hand: a $94 million loan from the RFC, fast tax write-offs on plant and railroad, and a price prop at 24-c- a Ib. With copper now selling at 43-c- a Ib., Magma's rough-and-ready President Wesley P. Goss had plenty of reason to fire up San Manuel ahead of schedule. Says he: "When you have more than $100 million tied up, you are interested in getting into production as quickly as possible and getting some of those dollars back."

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