Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Panoramic Map Collection. Butte City, Montana, 1884

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Panoramic Map Collection. “Butte City, Montana, 1884.”

Early in the 1850s, a trading company representative set up camp on Dublin Creek where he was to rendezvous with members from the Crow and Shoshoni tribes. At his campsite, Caleb Irvine found a trench cut alongside a vein of quartz. Nearby were antlers that appeared to have been used to dig the trench. This trench was probably the first attempt at mining in the Butte area, but no one knows who dug it. Did some prospector wander through, or was it local natives who found a shiny metal? Since Caleb was not interested in gold, and probably thought he might have stumbled onto someone’s claim, he did not say anything about his find. It wasn’t until nearly ten years later that gold nuggets and dust were found by prospectors in Silver Bow Creek that the gold era in Butte began.

Prospectors panning and using cradles, or rockers, quickly lined the edges of Silver Bow Creek. As space along the river bank became scarce, miners moved up the hillsides and its gulches hunting for the major veins of ore. One of these enterprising prospectors happened upon the site Caleb Irvine had seen years before. The prospector filed a claim and opened a tunnel to follow the vein of quartz into the mountainside. This claim developed into Butte’s first hard-rock mine, The Original. As other prospectors filed claims, word of the new strike spread rapidly, drawing more and more miners and the people who “mined the miners” to the area.

Miners worked the claims but they needed food, supplies, and entertainment. People who filled these needs literally, “mined the miners”. In many cases, people who supplied the miners became wealthier than their counterparts who owned the claims. As everyone moved into areas where new strikes occurred, boom towns grew rapidly. Not much care was given to the permanence of the structures. Buildings were often log cabins with sod roofs, lean-to structures against the mountains, or even canvas tents. These buildings were occupied by merchants, saloons, dance halls, hotels, and brothels where the miners could restock supplies, get a bath, sleep in a bed, and be entertained—all for the right amount of gold dust or nuggets. Boom towns were boisterous, dirty, smelly, and loud. In the summers they were hot and dusty. The rest of the time, roads were knee-deep in mud and filled with horse manure. As bad as conditions were, Butte mines produced $90 million in gold between 1862 and 1866 and drew an amazing mix of people to the town—Metis (French and Native-American), Spanish, Chinese, Germans, Dutch, Slavs, British, Irish, Jewish, and African-Americans. This mix of people added to the flavor of the town, but like the inhabitants of any boom town, they were fickle—always hunting for the next big strike.

By the 1870s, the placer gold was “playing out,” disappearing, and people were leaving Butte. By 1870, fewer than 150 people remained there. Prospectors were eager to sell their claims and a mining speculator named William Clark came to Butte to buy up some of these claims. So many claims had been abandoned by 1874 that Congress passed a law saying that claims had to be worked before January 1, 1875, or they would become void. Just before the deadline, Bill Farlin, one of the miners who had remained in Butte, went back to his claim on the mountain deciding to dig just a bit deeper. He struck a huge vein of galena (silver-bearing lead) and began another “rush” to Butte Hill. By 1876, Butte had a population of over 1000.

Mining silver moved Butte and its residents firmly into the hard-rock stage of mining. Hard-rock mining, however, required heavy machinery, especially stamp mills which crushed the rocks into a fine, silt-like powder so it could be processed through vats of chemicals to extract the ore. After extracting the ore, the remaining silt and rock was deposited into huge piles called tailings. Getting heavy machinery to places like Butte required two important changes—investment capital to buy the huge stamps and good transportation to get the machinery to remote areas. These two new requirements created a unique tie between Butte and the Utah Territory.

Recognizing that transportation through the northern regions of the Great Plains was dangerous during this time period because of the Indian Wars with the Sioux tribes, freight companies from Utah began cutting a road between Corrine, Utah and Butte in the 1860s. In 1876, the Utah and Northern Railroad followed the Corrine Cutoff route and began laying track through the mountains to Montana. Arriving in Butte in 1881, the Utah and Northern (which had been purchased by James J. Hill and J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities by that time) became the main link for Butte to a transcontinental railroad creating that important means of transporting heavy mining equipment. Also in 1876, the Walker Brothers (bankers and mining investors from Salt Lake City) sent Marcus Daly to Butte to assess the possibility of buying silver mining properties there. The Walker Brothers soon became the proud owners of the Alice Mine and Daly became its manager in exchange for partial interest in the property. As with other mines in the area, miners moved close to the mine where they worked and towns like Walkerville, Meaderville, Centerville, and McQueen developed on the outskirts of Butte.

About the same time the Walker Brothers invested in the Alice Mine and silver industry, silver was being used more and more as a monetary unit by the United States and the rest of the world. Once the railroad arrived so that heavy equipment could be moved in, Montana quickly became one of the largest producers of silver in the country, ranking only behind the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and Butte was its center. This status was maintained until 1893 when the U.S. decided not to buy silver to coin into money any more. Until that time, however, Butte’s output of silver was over $20 million per year. The decline in the value of solver threw Butte and the entire country into an economic panic in 1893. Butte managed to survive the panic because of its ever-increasing copper production.

In 1880, Marcus Daly had decided that the future of Butte mining rested in the deposits of copper ore found in many of the mines. He sold his interest in the Alice Mine and turned to a mining group from San Francisco for additional capital to purchase a copper mine. One of the members of this group was George Hearst who began his mining career when he won a share of the Comstock Lode in Nevada in a poker game. He sold that share and bought partial ownership of the Ontario silver mine in Park City, Utah. He took profits from the Ontario and invested in a mine in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1878. Then, he became partners with Daly in the Anaconda Mine and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Butte. Daly had been right in his prediction that copper was the wave of the future. After Edison invented the light bulb in 1876, electricity quickly became a necessity. Although gold was a better conductor, it was too expensive and in demand for currency. Copper was found to be a satisfactory conductor for electric and telephone wires and the copper boom began with Butte at its center. In 1884, Butte boasted 300 mines, 9 quartz mills, and 4 smelters that employed over 5000 people. Just three years later, Butte was the world’s leading producer of copper. It held this distinction for 30 years. Nearly all of Butte’s mines contained copper. When it became valuable enough to bother with the smelting process, copper became the primary ore with gold and silver as valuable byproducts. Three men—Marcus Daly, William Clark, and to a lesser degree Augutus Heinze—became known as the Copper Kings. Mine owners built smelters and increased their profits.

Copper production required an extensive smelter process. As copper mining grew, smelters began to dot the Silver Bow Valley. The air filled with toxic sulfurous smoke released in the smelting process. William Clark tried to convince Butte residents that the sulfurous gas in the air worked like a disinfectant to remove disease carrying organisms from the air and, ultimately, make people healthier. This may have worked for a short people of time, but eventually people began to organize their complaints. In an effort to clean up the air, smoke stacks were built higher (some reaching over 500 ft. high) and smelters were moved to outlying areas. Marcus Daly moved his smelter 30 miles away to a newly created town called Anaconda. William Clark eventually moved his smelter to Great Falls. Both smelters were kept working at maximum capacity and created huge man-made mountains of tailings and slag. Although the smoke was located farther away, the noxious fumes still remained. The air smelled like rotten eggs. Tailings, the surplus rock left after smelting, were still loaded with toxic chemicals and the mines were plagued by water and by silica dust that got into miners lungs. The human and environmental toll taken by hard-rock mining was high but the wages were high and miners came from all over the world to work in Butte’s mines. Places like Finntown, Meadeville, Dublin Gulch, Corktown, and Parrot Flat were filled with Italians, Croatians, Serbians, Finns, Lebanese, Chinese, Mexicans, Austrians, and African-Americans who came to work on the “Richest Hill on Earth.”

As Butte’s reputation for mineral wealth increased, outside investors became more and more involved in the city’s mines. When the U.S. stopped buying silver for coinage and a financial panic began, the major owners of Butte mines, actively sought funds from the eastern U.S. In 1899, Marcus Daly enlisted help from George Rockefeller (an officer of the Standard Oil Company formed by his brother, John D.) and Standard Oil to create the giant Amalgamated Copper Mining Co. This company dominated the mining, the politics, and the economy of Butte for the next 70 years.

As Daly turned his attentions to expanding Amalgamated and its total control of Butte, William Clark, another copper king decided to try to gain power elsewhere in Montana and ran for the U.S. Senate. Clark and Daly had been in a power struggle since the 1870s when the territory’s first attempt at statehood and a battle over its capitol city had erupted between the two men. Ultimately, Clark had won the battle of the capitol which became Helena where Daly’s control was less evident. Daly had never forgotten and used the power over his workers to insure that Clark would be defeated in his bid for the U.S. Senate. Realizing that Clark needed the support of Butte’s miners in order to win the election, he had purchased land and built the Columbia Gardens amusement park in 1899 encouraging Butte residents to come and enjoy the park and never charging an admission fee. Clark ran for the Senate again, and, thanks to Daly, lost. In 1900, Marcus Daly died of cancer. In 1901 Clark ran for the Senate again. This time he won.

With Daly’s death, the “outsiders” from the East who were not directly involved in the community and strangers to the miners took control of the mines, buying out several smaller companies along the way. By 1910, the company name was changed to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, one of the largest trusts of the 20th century. In 1889, a third player had entered the war for control of Butte mountain named Augustus Heinze. From that point until the early 20th century, Heinze tried to undermine the grip of Amalgamated/Anaconda on the mines and miners of Butte. He granted his workers an 8 hour working day. Clark followed, making Anaconda Copper face the possibility of losing their workers. Heinze also made use of a Congressional ruling called the Apex law to his advantage. According to this law, the owners of a mine had the legal right to follow any vein from the point where it reached the surface to its natural conclusion—even if that crossed or entered the workings of another mine. Heinze’s use of this law caused dozens of lawsuits between his company, the Montana Ore Purchasing Company, and Anaconda Copper. Heinze died in 1914 and Anaconda immediately bought all of his holdings in Butte, giving them a virtual monopoly of all the mining in Butte.

The only two disruptions of this monopoly came during the two world wars when the U.S. government declared martial law so that the companies and miners were forced to produce the amount of copper needed for the war effort. Soldiers were first called to Butte when the local union hall in Butte was blown up in 1914. Soldiers were sent to Butte to make sure disturbances did not disrupt copper production. Machine guns were installed on the tops of many of the sixteen headframes (the 100 ft. high pulley mechanisms that lowered miners into the mines and lifted the ore cars out) that existed in the city and its suburbs. Under martial law the miners were even prevented from forming in small groups of three or four men on street corners because it was feared they were organizing a union strike. Production, however, soared. Anaconda Copper produced 51 percent of the copper and 98 percent of the manganese used during WWII.

After WWII, the price and demand for copper greatly decreased. Anaconda was faced with the prospect of closing its operation and putting thousands of miners and thousands more people associated with secondary mining occupations out of work. They decided to focus on a much less expensive way of extracting the ores from the mountain. They began open-pit mining on the site of the Berkeley Mine in 1955. The hard-rock miners either moved away or adapted to the techniques of pit mining. The pit slowly chewed away at Butte Hill, swallowing mine after mine-- the Silver Bow, Pennsylvania Main, Berkeley, Anaconda, Never Sweat, St. Lawrence, Mountain View, Moonlight, Parrott, High Ore, Modoc, Molly Murphy, Rarus--and community after community--Columbia Gardens, Dublin Gulch, Parrot Flat, McQueen, Finntown, and Meaderville. All lost to the pit. Open pit mining continued in Butte until the 1970s.

In the 1970s, many things happened to change the fortunes of Anaconda Copper. In 1971, President Allende of Chile nationalized Anaconda Copper Company’s mine in Chile. The demand for copper was declining. In 1970, the United States founded the Environmental Protection Agency which placed new regulations that made mining more expensive. Montana founded a similar agency of their own. In addition, committees of citizens in Butte were concerned about the growth of the huge pit and loss of communities for the purpose of expanding the pit further. By 1975, Anaconda decided they needed to close down underground mining operations in Butte and laid off 3000 miners. Anaconda sold its Butte operations to ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Company), an oil and natural gas conglomerate, in 1977. ARCO operated the Butte mines for only five years before they decided to shut the operations down. Nearly 5000 people lost their jobs as miners, smelter workers, etc. In 1982, the Kelley Mine, Butte’s last underground operation was shut down and the pumps that had kept water from flooding the mines for nearly a century were turned off. The citizens of Butte were dazed but the fun had just started. No one expected what would happen next. Or, if they did, no one said anything about it.

From the time the pumps were shut off, the Berkeley Pit began to fill with water. As water combined with sulfurous minerals in the hard-rock mines, it took on acidic qualities. Surface water in the newly created Berkeley Lake has about the same acidic quality as a cola soda pop. Deeper waters, however, are more acidic.. Water flows through underground aquifers that were penetrated by the deep mining shafts, some of which were a mile deep, and into the pit. Surface water flows downhill from the tailings into the pit. Before it was diverted, a creek flowed into the pit. Water coming from the aquifers carry with them magnesium, iron, manganese, aluminum, copper, zinc, and sulfates. In addition, arsenic from the mines and tailings has also entered into the mixture. The pit is a chemically layered system with the most dangerously contaminated water layered on the bottom. Even the surface water, however, contains toxic metals and arsenic. This was discovered in 1996 when a flock of Snow Geese landed on the lake during their migration. Over 300 of the geese died from the water. As the contamination gets worse, the colors change from brownish-red on the top to green/blue-green on the bottom. Current water level in the pit is 5,280 feet above sea level and over 1000 ft. deep. The level reaches the critical stage at 5,410 feet when it reaches a level above the aquifer that supplies water for Butte. At the 5,509 ft. level, water would flow out of the pit. Water has risen 11 feet since 2007. A water treatment plant became operational in 2004, slowing down the rise of the water. This plant is designed to reclaim the heavy metals from the pit water. It literally “mines” the water.