text: It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1986.
  History
  In the summer of 1900, two prospectors, "Tarantula" Jack Smith and Clarence L. Warner, a group of prospectors associated with the McClellan party, spotted "a green patch far above them in an improbable location for a grass-green meadow." The green turned out to be malachite, located with chalcocite (aka "copper glance"), and the location of the Bonanza claim.  A few days later, Arthur Coe Spencer, U.S. Geological Survey geologist independently found chalcocite at the same location, but was too late to stake any valuable claims.
  Stephen Birch, a mining engineer just out of school, was in Alaska looking for investment opportunities in minerals.  He had the financial backing of the Havemeyer Family, and another investor named James Ralph, from his days in New York.  Birch spent the winter of 1901-1902 acquiring the "McClellan group's interests" for the Alaska Copper Company of Birch, Havemeyer, Ralph and Schultz, later to become the Alaska Copper and Coal Company.  In the summer of 1901, he visited the property and "spent months mapping and sampling."  He confirmed the Bonanza mine and surrounding by deposits were, at the time, the richest known concentration of copper in the world.