PHOTO: JOHN ELK III/LONELY PLANET IMAGES the ugly duckling of the mining world to the intensely
desired swan, and nowhere was this change in status as marked as in the mountains of western Montana, where a combination of rapacious greed coupled with ironclad deter- mination turned a mountainside into the hell on earth known as Butte.
Boomtown
For a visitor rolling down the grade toward Butte aboard the Northern Pacific Railway at the start of the twentieth century, the scene that would have unfolded before him would have resembled something straight out of Dante’s
l Once known as the Richest Hill on Earth, Butte, Montana, was the source of immense mineral wealth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To- day, it is a down-to-earth place, where past and present intermingle and the indomitable mining spirit lives on.
Inferno. Smokestacks would have belched smoke as black as the buildings from which it emerged while steam locomotives puffed away, shunting ore cars back and forth between shafts and spoils dumps.
Wires would have screeched over headframes (the tall struc- tures positioned over vertical mine shafts) while plunging thousands of feet into the earth to lower men into the mines and carry precious ore back to the surface. Hanging over everything would have been a pall of smoke and dust so toxic that the residents of Butte couldn’t even grow flowers or vegetables in their yards.
The early twentieth-century visitor to Butte wouldn’t
have seen or even been aware of the political deals, the stock manipulations, or the outright chicanery that allowed
u Miners like these, shown here outside the Anaconda copper mines around 1910, spent their lives wrestling ore from the ground.
r
As shown in this late-nineteenth-century photo of Butte, little space separated the town’s mining and residential areas, leading to soil contamination that once prevented residents from growing flowers or vegetables.
T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E
PHOTO: ©BETTMANN/CORBIS 43
PHOTO: ©DAZO VINTAGE STOCK PHOTOS/
IMAGES.COM/CORBIS
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