PHOTO: ROB CRANDALL/PHOTOLIBRARY
massive copper mining fortunes to be built up in the hands of a few select men and companies. Instead, he would have been more likely to have noticed the growing power of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which eventually managed to control almost all the mining in Butte. He probably would have heard of the epic struggles between labor unions and mine managers (Butte was under martial law from 1914 to 1921). And he probably would have seen the vast divide between the lives of luxury lived by mine owners and the hard- ships of the men who spent their lives wrestling the ore from the ground, helping Butte live up to its nickname: the Richest Hill on Earth.
But the Richest Hill on Earth and the fortunes it represented came at a terrible human cost. Fatalities from accidents involving the cages in which men were lowered into the mines, fires, and explosions were not uncom- mon. According to some estimates, as many as 2,500 miners died in Butte’s underground mines between the 1860s and 1976, when underground mining was finally abandoned in Butte. A large percentage of these men, as many as 685, may have been killed during the relatively short period between 1906 and 1925. On one occasion alone, on June 8, 1917, no fewer than 167 men were killed when an underground fire broke out in the Granite Mountain Mine and spread to the neighboring Speculator Mine. Dangerous as the work was, however, Butte’s output continued to increase. The discovery of the town’s copper bonanzas had coincided with the electrification of the United States and the rest of the world in the late nineteenth century, but its copper production didn’t reach its highest levels until World War I.
Each and every cartridge used in the struggle for supremacy in Europe during the war contained a portion of copper, and if that weren’t enough to keep Butte’s mines active, the ore taken out of the ground in Butte also contained sizable amounts of gold, silver, zinc, lead, and other minerals, all of which were beneficial to the bottom lines of the companies that
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Filled with contaminated water, the Berkeley Pit open-pit copper mine is one of the costliest toxic waste sites in America.
owned the mines and the livelihoods of the men who worked them.
Butte Goes Bust In time, however, the ore started to
run out, and in 1955, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company began digging the Berkeley Pit, an above- ground open-pit copper mine capable of profiting from ore containing as little as 0.5 percent copper. By the mid-1970s, however, the company’s underground operations closed, and three thousand hard rock miners were impersonally laid off and discarded. Butte’s economy began to sink, and when even the Berkeley Pit was finally closed in 1982, the Atlantic Richfield Company, the company that had bought the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, turned off the dewatering pumps in the underground tunnels in order to save an estimated $400,000 a year. As a result, water loaded with toxic chemicals began seeping into the pit from the under- ground mines, creating one of the costliest toxic waste sites in America. Atlantic Richfield’s decision to turn off the pumps has already cost millions of dollars in cleanup expenses, and it will
cost millions of dollars more to finish the cleanup, which is being adminis- tered by Superfund, the US govern- ment program responsible for cleaning up or forcing offenders to clean up hazardous waste sites.
In a way, the “bust” cycle of Butte’s economy has made the city a more interesting place than it might otherwise have been. Today, as a visitor descends from Homestake Pass on Interstate 90 and the city comes into view bordered by the wounded landscape of the massive Berkeley Pit, the skyline of the city is still punctu- ated with jet black headframes. All that is missing is the frenzy of activity associated with mining bonanzas. There hasn’t been much money for urban renewal and the replacement of the old with the new, as happens in many other American cities. As a result, as you drive through Butte, you will pass unique, one-of-a-kind buildings, each in their own way reflecting the glory that was Butte at the peak of its mineral wealth. Visitors will look in vain for the
sterile glass office buildings that fill so many downtown city districts, seeing instead the wonderful architectural
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