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The front cover of the large-format book “Ore and Empire: Conquistadors to Guggenheims on the Camino Real” invites readers into a once-imposing world of smelting. That world is made visible through Martin Stupich’s extraordinary industrial and environmental photography.

The cover image shows the No. 13 incline belt conveyor, with its overhead gas delivery bus of the El Paso ASARCO smelter and one of its two iconic stacks before the operation was permanently shuttered and demolished in 2013.

ASARCO, which stands for American Smelting and Refining Company, was located in El Paso. It was central to the multinational mining and smelting empire that Swiss American patriarch Meyer Guggenheim started small in Leadville, Colorado, during the Gilded Age.

Remembered today are the artifacts of civilization — the smelters, the railroads, the cathedrals, the adobe villages, Stupich, an sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ��� resident, writes.

The people we remember “are those who paid or owned or commanded the laborers and the miners,” he writes.

Among them are conquistador Don Juan de Oñate, Mexican president Benito Juárez, Pancho Villa and Guggenheim.

However, the intent of Stupich’s book is to pay tribute to the unnamed thousands of laborers who built those artifacts.

“They have this in common: Everything I see was built by someone, by some community, by some person multiplied by the thousands over the centuries — persons whose names are lost,” Stupich writes in the introduction.

With this book project, Stupich assigns himself an enormous task — “to look for, then to make tangible, the remnants left by these anonymous thousands over half a millennium,” he writes.

The El Paso smelter, in operation since the late 1880s, is the epicenter of his project.

In the photographs section is a panoramic view on facing pages of the smelter, which, as Stupich notes, “is stitched together from 10 separate medium-format negatives.”

More than 60 of Stupich’s color photographs document what the smelter looked like in three stages — during predemolition, during the actual demolition and during site remediation.

Many of the predemolition photos reveal the smelter’s innumerable, imposing, complex elements, such as the acid plant’s high-velocity blower ductwork; scrap recovered from machinery awaiting recycling; an eerie view looking between the concrete walls of the double tube stack; a crescent of daylight seeping in 828 feet above Stupich’s ground-level camera; a 12-foot in diameter flywheel that was part of the smelter’s steam-powered electrical generating system.

One of the few demolition photos shows the detonations that safely brought down the smelter’s two concrete main stacks in April 2013.

Among the photographs of site remediation is one of a smelter slag dump being cleared and reengineered to bury demolition debris before it was capped. The remediation work ensured a clean flow from the arroyo watershed into the Rio Grande a few hundred yards away.

ASARCO’s 100-acre site was also yards from Sunland Park and separated from Ciudad Juárez by the Rio Grande.

Related mining operations extended into New Mexico. 

In 1910, to minimize potential smelter disruptions by the Mexican Revolution, the Guggenheim company bought the Santa Rita open-pit mine near Silver City to help assure a supply of copper ore for its El Paso smelter.

At the Hop Canyon Mill, one mile south of Magdalena, ASARCO processed copper and lead from early in the 20th century until 1947. The mill processed ore dug from the nearby Kelly Mine.

Guggenheim’s very first mining venture was the 1880 purchase, sight unseen, of an underperforming Leadville lead and silver mine.

In the book’s introduction, Stupich draws a parallel between the 16th and 17th century conquistadors’ mining and smelting exploits, and the late 19th century to mid-20th century Guggenheim mining and smelting empire that reached into Mexico, farther south to Peru, Chile and Bolivia, and north to Alaska.

Centuries before the Guggenheims, the conquistadors oversaw mining/smelting in Mexico.

“From 1519 forward,” Stupich writes, “greed and entitlement turned these (conquistador) fortune hunters inevitably into warrior-conquerors, licensed by Spain’s crown to pillage, exploit, baptize, and govern the civilizations whose land they occupied.”

By 1750, silver mined in central Mexico (and Peru) was shipped to Spain to expand its global reach, he writes.

Some of the treasure stayed in the New World as rewards to the conquistadors and royal officials and to pay for the building of great “silver cathedrals,” including the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. The largest Catholic cathedral in the Americas, it was built on top of the rubble of Aztec sacred sites, and the masonry from demolished pyramids and temples were reused in the cathedral’s construction, a cutline states.

Stupich also writes in the preface that he finally saw a modern map of the Guggenheims’ industrial empire, which nicely fits atop the 17th century map of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

“In places, conquistadors and Guggenheims had mined the same lodes (exactly!), traveled the same roads (exactly!), and depended for labor on families whose ancestors worked the same veins centuries earlier,” he wrote.

A photograph in the preface shows an old silver smelter at Santa Brígida, in Guanajuato state. A cutline says its triple-stack smelter was built in 1595 by Native Americans working for Jesuits licensed under Spanish King Felipe II.

Its ovens and stacks straddled El Camino Real. “The handiwork is so splendid that this three-story marvel feels mere decades old, not four centuries,” the caption notes.

The Guggenheim company’s vast mining and smelting operations in Mexico were in virtually the same corridor — El Camino Real — as those of the conquistadors, who paved the way for 19th and 20th century exploration.

A map of important sites on El Camino Real in Mexico, through New Mexico, to Leadville is keyed to a timeline in the introduction.

Basically, the legacies of Oñate and Guggenheim are intertwined, Stupich said.

The book also contains three informative essays: “A Brief History of El Paso del Norte” by Michael Romero Taylor; “The Muse of Enterprise: The Industrial Landscape of El Paso” by Betsy Fahlman; and “The Old Topographics” by Toby Jurovics.

Dagoberto Gilb, a writer of fiction and nonfiction, wrote the foreword.