A cautionary tale

Posted 8/21/12

Butte, Montana was once a boom town for copper mining. Massive steel head-frames still dot the landscape throughout the city. At night they are illuminated in crimson. In the last part of the 19th …

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A cautionary tale

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Butte, Montana was once a boom town for copper mining. Massive steel head-frames still dot the landscape throughout the city. At night they are illuminated in crimson. In the last part of the 19th century, more than 100,000 people lived in Butte, from all parts of the world. It was a cosmopolitan city with theaters, grand hotels, elegant mansions and a Victorian amusement park with a wooden roller coaster and vast public gardens.

Now 30,000 people live there, next to the largest EPA Superfund site in the nation. The locals call it the “Pit.” It is an egregious scar on the landscape whose background includes the Rocky Mountains and a sky that seems to go on forever.

Our daughter moved to Butte last summer. It was a “convenient” place to merge her interest in public history with her interest in a young man who is getting his education at Montana Tech. Or, as she likes to say, it was as far away from us as she could get on U.S. soil. She accepted an internship at a history museum in Missoula and a job at a cafe in Butte. She loves it there.

We went to see what she liked about it. The landscape is stunning, with rough-edged mountains encircling a vast landscape. The city of Butte is a three-hour trip to Yellowstone National Park through mountain-pass roads dotted with sparkling lakes, waterfalls, red-rock and granite walls, evergreens and golden Aspen trees, elk and eagles.

Both Butte and Missoula have active arts communities. Anywhere artists can live cheaply and in the thrall of nature spawns those. Both cities have historic districts that have managed to preserve some of the distinctive architecture of the boom years. In Butte’s Finlen Hotel, whose guests included Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Nixon among other notables, only the lobby is open to non-guests. But oh, what a lobby! Thick marble walls and floors, soaring ceilings, massive chandeliers invite you in. But when asked if the Art-Deco-signed coffee shop is open, the concierge confesses, “No, we found the sign in the basement.” The Finlen, like Butte, is not what it used to be.

What happened to Butte was greed, with no thought for the future. At the height of the mining, one man, William A Clark, was reeling in up to $2 million a day from his holdings. His competitors, known collectively as The Copper Kings, were yielding similar returns. Thousands of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy joined former African-American slaves to work in the mines that were a mile deep in life-threatening conditions for a living wage. Coal was the principal energy source, which gave Butte its nickname as Pittsburgh of the West for the thick black smog that settled easily in its valley. Mines never took a holiday; they operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three shifts a day.

If the coal smog wasn’t bad enough, the Copper Kings used huge smelters to extract the ore. The smelters spewed toxic sulphur over the city. The huge Anaconda smelter is the tallest man-made masonry structure in the nation. It stands in a National Park site that is too toxic to visit, just 30 miles from Butte.

When the ore was fully mined in the methods then used, the Copper Kings left Butte behind, preferring to invest their profits in the stock market and New York real estate than to clean up their mess. William Clark built and lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City while he ran for the U.S. Senate from Montana. He had to resign his seat after a vote-buying scandal, but was later re-elected.

Montanans are hard-put to forget their history of abuse by corporate interests. Their best reminder is an open pit of toxic waste in the middle of the former grandeur of Butte. In 2012, six months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its Citizens United ruling, overturning Montana’s 100-year-old Corrupt Practices Act against corporate contributions to election campaigns, Montana voters approved a ballot initiative (293,000 to 98,000) stating that “corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not human beings.” They ought to know.

[For more information on mining in Montana, read “The War of the Copper Kings” by C.B. Glasscock. Helena, MT: Riverbend Publications, 2002. ISBN 1-931832-21-8]

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