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The geographic feature known as Bingham Canyon received its name from the location's two first settlers, the brothers Thomas and Sanford Bingham, who arrived in the canyon in 1848. Initially, the area was utilized for livestock grazing and logging, but the region's economic focus changed with the 1863 discovery of rich gold and silver ore bodies in the canyon. Mining activity in Bingham Canyon boomed after the Bingham Canyon and Camp Floyd Rail Road completed a line to the canyon in 1873, and as the region grew the focus shifted to the high-quality copper ores in the district. As the mines grew, the town of Bingham also expanded, spreading along the narrow and steep canyon floor below the mines.

The Bingham Canyon mines experienced their greatest boom during the first years of the twentieth century, as the district's smaller mines were consolidated under large corporate ownership. The most significant development occurred in 1903, when Daniel C. Jackling organized the Utah Copper Company to begin surface mining at Bingham Canyon. The Utah Copper Company's mine prospered, and this brought a tremendous influx of new residents into the canyon. The town of Bingham Canyon was officially incorporated on February 29, 1904.

By the 1920s, the city of Bingham Canyon was at its peak, with perhaps 15,000 inhabitants. Urban development spread for some seven miles along the single, narrow road winding up the steep canyon floor.

As with many western mining towns, the Bingham Canyon area evolved into a collection of diverse neighborhoods, many with pronounced ethnic affiliations. Many Scandinavians lived in the Carr Fork area, while southern and eastern Europeans congregated in Highland Boy, which was in another branch canyon toward the top of the main city. As the mainstreet in the bottom of the canyon grew, Copperfield became the name of the upper section of the main town. Bingham itself attracted British, French, Irish, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other immigrants and ethnicities. Numerous other small neighborhoods and communities also existed. Most took the name of the mine where they were located. Commercial, Boston Con, and "the Niagara" were the first three communities to be mined away or covered, as the last one was by Galena Gulch waste dumps. Others were the Galena, Old Jordan, and Silver Shield (these three found in Galena Gulch), along with Niagara. Telegraph was in the upper part of the canyon, along with Copperfield, which was threatened when the mining excavating was expanded and a long one-way tunnel was built before 1940 to allow traffic to reach the upper communities. Many names were colorful: Terrace Heights, Dinkeyville, Jap Camp, and Greek camp were sections of Copperfield. The Frisco, Yampa, Phoenix, and Apex were in Carr Fork along with Highland Boy. Further down the canyon were Markham, Freeman, and Frog Town (lower Bingham).

The size and importance of the Bingham community began to fade as early as the 1920s. The canyon's difficult geography made urban development difficult, while exposing the town to the hazards of fire and avalanche. The first effort to reduce settlement in the canyon came in 1926, when Utah Copper established the town of Copperton on the flats east of the canyon mouth. This was a lovely community with many copper products used in the building of the houses, and the low rent encouraged company employees to live there. In 1956, Kennecott sold the homes to employees for $4,800 to $6,000. Increasing mechanization at the mine also reduced local employment—and hence, Bingham Canyon's population.

On 17 February 1926, seventy-nine people were killed when a snow avalanche destroyed a mining camp in the area.

By the 1930s it was becoming apparent that the most significant threat to the town of Bingham was the mine itself, whose ever-expanding open pit began encroaching on lands formerly occupied by miners' neighborhoods. The mine continued to eat away at Bingham throughout the middle years of the twentieth century, and by 1971 little of the town remained. That November, Bingham Canyon's 31 remaining residents voted 11–2 to disincorporate the town, and the last buildings at Bingham were razed in 1972. Today, most of the land once occupied by Bingham has been consumed by the Bingham Canyon Mine.

Minerals, in the form of copper ore, were first discovered in Bingham Canyon in 1848 by two brothers, Sanford and Thomas Bingham, sons of Erastus Bingham, Latter-Day Saint pioneers of September 1847, who grazed their cattle there. They reported their find to their leader, Brigham Young, who advised against pursuing mining operations because the survival and establishment of settlements were of paramount importance at that time. The brothers applied to that purpose as directed and did not stake a claim. In 1850, the Bingham family went to settle what is now Weber County, leaving the canyon still today known by their name.

Bingham mine was part of the historical West Mountain Mining District. It was not until September 17, 1863, with the organization of mining districts in the state of Utah, that extraction of ore began, and the potential of the canyon's mineral resources began to be widely recognized. The first claim located was "Jordan S.M.Co" (Silver Mining Company) on September 17, 1863, the day the district was organized. Soon followed were other mining claims, including Galina and Independence in 1864, and Buckeye and Spanish in 1865. George B. Ogilvie and 23 others located the West Jordan claim in 1870. At first, mining was confined to placer gold, lead-silver, and copper-gold. Porphyry copper required processing and a railroad, which reached the canyon in 1873.

Enos Andrew Wall started working claims in 1887. His extensive tunnels and test pits, on his 200-acre (81 ha), indicated ore containing 2% copper.

The canyon's 19th Century mines were relatively small, and it wasn't until the end of the century that very large-scale exploitation of the canyon's ore bodies began to develop with open-pit mining. In 1896, Samuel Newhouse and Thomas Weir acquired the Highland Boy Mine, which was rich in copper, silver, and gold. Together they formed the Utah Consolidated Gold Mines, Ltd. with English investors. They then formed the Boston Consolidated Gold and Copper Co., Ltd., for the development of low-grade copper ore adjacent to the Utah Copper Company site.

Another significant development took place in 1903, when Daniel C. Jackling and Enos A. Wall organized the Utah Copper Company. Utah Copper immediately began construction of a pilot mill at Copperton, just beyond the mouth of the canyon, and the company actually started mining in 1906.

The success of Utah Copper in mining the huge but low-grade porphyry copper type ore body at Bingham Canyon was based on Jacklin's 1904 decision to use open-pit mining, steam shovels, and the railroad. The mine became a showplace for "railroad-pit operations," and the industrial complex defined by the mine and the ASARCO smelting operation made it the "largest industrial mining complex in the world" by 1912.

Utah Copper and Boston Consolidated merged after their separate surface operations approached each other in 1906. The Kennecott Copper Corporation, established to operate mines in Kennecott, Alaska, purchased a 25 percent financial interest in Utah Copper in 1915, which increased to 75 percent in 1923.

Bingham's Canyon mine expanded rapidly, and by the 1920s, the region was a beehive of activity. Some 15,000 people of widely varying ethnicity lived in the canyon in large residential communities constructed on the steep canyon walls. The population declined rapidly as mining techniques improved, and several of the mining camps were swallowed up by the ever-expanding mine. By 1980, when Lark was dismantled, only Copperton, at the mouth of Bingham Canyon and with a population of 800, remained.

The 21 separate mining operations in existence by 1911 were consolidated into two in 1970: Kennecott and The Anaconda Minerals Company. In 1985 open-pit mining operations were halted by Kennecott's Utah Copper. In 1986, Kennecott discovered gold in nearby Barney's Canyon.

KCC was purchased by Sohio in 1981, and the mine reopened in 1987 after BP Minerals purchased the assets. In 1989 the Rio Tinto Group acquired the asset, which modernized the mine, mill, and smelter.

The open-pit owners replaced an antiquated 1000-car railroad with conveyor belts and pipelines for transporting the ore and waste, which reduced costs by nearly 30% and returned the operation to profitability.

At 9:30 pm on April 10, 2013, a landslide occurred at the mine. Around 2.3–2.5 billion cubic feet (65×10^–70×10^ m) of dirt and rock thundered down the side of the pit. It is possibly the largest historic non-volcanic landslide in North America. On the basis that the mine's steep walls made it a high risk for landslides, an interferometric radar system had been previously installed to monitor the ground's stability. As a result of warnings produced by this system, mining operations had been shut down the previous day in anticipation of the slide and there were no injuries. The massive slide was expected to cut production of mined copper by 100,000 tonnes (98,000 long tons; 110,000 short tons). A second slide caused an evacuation of 100 workers on September 11, 2013. Another, less severe slide occurred on May 31, 2021.

Similar to other industrial age mining operations, the mine historically had adverse environmental effects on the habitats of fish and wild animals as well as air and water pollution, creating health hazards to the surrounding public. Different federal agencies concerned with environmental conservation have used strict legal rules to pressure the subsidiary of Kennecott copper mine to comply with environmental regulations. Since the early 1990s, Kennecott has spent more than $400 million on clean-up efforts on the affected areas to avoid regulatory laws that would have placed them on the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL).

The figure above shows a comparison of two satellite images used to identify the changes in the Bingham Canyon Mine between 1985 and 2016 JuxtaposeJS Embed