Butte,
MT : History of Butte, Montana.gif)
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| Downtown Butte, Montana |
Before we can even begin to touch upon what Butte is today,
it is highly necessary to provide a quick history of Butte.
Without understanding the basic history of Butte, it makes
it much more difficult to understand what Butte is today.
Butte
began as nothing more than a bunch of mining camps back
in the early 1870’s. Then, silver and copper was
discovered. This discovery began to bring in a flood of new
companies and new people to Butte. By the late 1870’s,
a large and bustling city center had emerged – and
was growing larger literally by the day. Then, as fate would
have it, a fire in 1879 burned down the entire central business
district. Following this disaster, the Butte city council
passed a law that required all new buildings downtown (known
as "uptown Butte") to be built from brick or stone – most
of which still stand today and what help make Butte such
a historic
and
unique city.
While
silver and gold were actively mined in Butte, it was copper
that truly put Butte on the map. Following the development
of electricity, the demand for copper mushroomed. The demand
for copper continued to increase – and really spiked
during World War I, where copper was used in every single
rifle bullet (much of which came from Butte). Indeed, it
is estimated that Butte supplied around 1/3 of the copper
for the United States in the late 1800’s and the early
part of the 1900’s.
The
World War I era was truly the boom time for Butte – as
demand soared for its minerals. Indeed, the city of Butte
claims in one of their signs that right after World War I,
Butte was the most prosperous town in the whole United States!
Not to miss out on all this prosperity, big business began
to get heavily involved. Standard Oil Company, though the
purchase of numerous mines and smelters, formed a conglomerate
called the Amalgmated Copper Mining Company in 1899, which
soon became the Anaconda Mining Company. Perhaps not coincidentally,
following the emergence of this large company, many problems
in the form of management-labor disputes began to happen.
Numerous strikes on behalf of Labor and strike-breaker actions
on the part of the companies began to commonly play out.
These confrontations between labor and management even led
to the shooting death of several miners by the hired security
of the mines.
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| Mining
Rig in Butte, Montana |
The
Anaconda Mining Company got so big, in fact, that by the
late 1920’s it was the fourth largest company in
the world – and by far the largest company in Montana.
It owned virtually every mine “on the hill” in
Butte (the “hill” is the hill above and around
Butte that contained all the minerals and where most active
mining was done).
During
the 1930’s and 40’s, Butte continued
to pour out tons of copper every day, although the Great
Depression of the 1930’s led to less demand for the
minerals and led to a resulting decline in population.
It was
the 1950’s, though, that really began to change
things for Butte. The Anaconda Mining Company, to reduce
the costs involved in the labor-intensive nature of underground
mining, began to shift to open strip mining. Thus, instead
of tunneling down for the copper, entire hillsides were instead
simply removed. The legacy of this is completely obvious
today, too, in the form of the Berkley Pit and other nearby
strip mines (some of which are still active strip mines
today). The other
legacy
of
this strip mining is that
two
towns and countless homes that were once located “on
the hill” were completely destroyed.
Throughout
the rest of the last half of the 1900’s,
mining was still conducted in Butte, with the large strip
mine – the Berkley Pit – shut down to active
mining operations in 1982. However, fewer and fewer people
worked in the industry, leading
to
a steady
loss of both businesses and people from
Butte.
To further
add injury to a loss of population, the environmental disaster
that Butte was finally began to be noticed. The
Superfund Act declared the area around Butte, including the
Berkeley Pitt, as a Superfund Site – the largest
in the US. The reason for this is because of all the heavy
metals
lying
around
on the surface
of the ground leach toxic metal into the nearby rivers and
into the water table. Before action was taken to clean this
up, it was not uncommon for the Clark Fork River (which begins
just to the west of Butte) to literally run red during heavy
rains.
The
Anaconda Mining Company in 1977 merged into the Arco company.
ARCO then ceased all mining operations in Butte
in 1983 (although they still ended up paying for the Superfund
Cleanup that followed). Strip mining operations resumed in
1983 when Montana Resources began active strip mining in
adjacent areas near the Berkeley Pit (see list of Berkeley
Pit Resrouces for more interesting information).
 
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