‘Get the water right down to your socks
This bulkhead's built of fallen brethren's bones
We all do what we can We endure our fellow man
And we sing our songs to the headframe's creaks and
moans’
The Decemberists, Rox in the Box
Copper. The water, if that’s what it was, mirrored a reflection of the hill above it, on its surface. Except for the scattered green of it. There was no green in the reflection. The water was here because of the earth that was here, and most of that wasn’t anymore. What had been a natural bowl sitting high in the Rockies, straddling the Continental Divide, the ‘Richest Hill on Earth,’ over a brief 125 years, became the most poisoned ground in America. The gold and silver mined here was almost ploughed aside by the advent of electricity, which exploded the world demand for copper. And where Robyn and I were standing, was where it all came out of the ground.
The tourist brochure had understated it a bit. Butte's urban landscape includes mining operations set within residential areas. There was only one congressman, in a state as big as Italy, and he had given away 44,000,000 acres of land to the Northern Pacific Railroad alone. The name of the game in Montana was, and still is, extraction. Between 1880 and 2005, the miners of Butte pulled out more than 9.6 million metric tons of copper, 2.1 million metric tons of zinc, 1.6 million metric tons of manganese, 381,000 metric tons of lead, 87,000 metric tons of molybdenum, 22,200 metric tons of silver, 90 metric tons of gold, and 22 billion dollars… set within residential areas.
The magnitude of the magnates, the three Copper Kings that championed the extraction, was evident on the land, thirty miles and 120 years away from our arrival in Butte that morning.
William Andrews Clark had begun to develop the silver and gold mines and mills before copper appeared on the radar. By 1876, Butte had a thousand inhabitants, and Clarke went on to wealth, and a desire to become a US senator which his newspaper, the Butte Miner, promoted. The members of the Montana legislature he bribed in 1899, didn’t get in the way. The second Copper King, Marcus Daly, had arrived in 1876 to inspect the Alice Mine for the entrepreneurial Walker brothers from Salt Lake City. Four years later he sold his interest and bought another mine, with investment money from several San Francisco moguls, including the father of William Randolph Hearst. In 1883 he filed a town plan for ‘Copperopolis, but eventually took the advice of his postmaster, and named in Anaconda. By the time that financiers William Rockefeller and Henry H. Rogers, two principals of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, teamed up to form the giant Amalgamated Copper Mining Co. In 1899, the air of Butte was filled with toxic sulfurous smoke. Daly responded with the construction of the tallest masonry structure on the planet, the 585-foot Anaconda smokestack, and smelter, the world’s largest nonferrous processing plant. The third Copper King, F. Augustus Heinze, had fought the dominance of Amalgamated but, when Daly died in 1900, the banker that picked up his widow, convinced him to sell out, creating a monopoly. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, true to its name, swallowed everything in its path, expanding into the fourth largest company in the world by 1920. It doesn’t matter how big of a ranch you have…or how many cattle you brand… or how much money you’ve got… the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather.
The Copper Kings are long under the last ground they extracted, leaving a legacy of discarded towns, rivers that will forever run red, and a generation of old men on respirators. They owned the greatest mother lode the earth had ever seen, at the time the world wanted and needed it most- the world’s biggest silver mine, one of the biggest gold mines, nearly a million acres of timberland, and freely cut on another million owned by the public. They bought the Montana legislature for ten thousand dollars a vote. They had people they didn’t like shot by national guardsmen, or hung from their railroad trestles.
For a Sunday morning, the casino was doing a roaring trade. We drove through Anaconda quietly, past the JFK Bar and Big Jim’s Steakhouse and the Grizzly Den Motel.
The sun was shining, and the sky was clear and blue when we arrived into Butte. The only thing that told us it was Butte was the ‘Butte’ sign on the side of one of the old black mine headframes, and the names of the streets, on the steep hills into town. Galena. Copper. Granite. Mercury. Quartz. The tallest structures on Montanan Street were the closed church steeples, and the open ironies. I passed the Abundant Life Fellowships, and parked, to find one of my own.
“You sure its open?” Asked Robyn. “It’s Sunday.” I wasn’t sure, but it was open. We went inside the M&M Cigar Store. It wasn’t full and it wasn’t empty, and it used to be both. Behind the counter was the usual coloured neon Bud Light…Lite… Budweiser… Pabst Blue Ribbon. Baseball caps hung above the bottles in front of the mirrored bar, providing an illusion of plenty. A baseball game, America’s other pastime, went on obliviously on televisions, in high corners of the saloon.The sound of gambling machines spilled into the space, and away with the hopes of their patrons. Dingdingdingdingdingding…
The place was dimly lit by suspended ceiling lamps and wall sconce lamps, and an elderly man with glasses, manning the off-track betting booth in the back. I migrated to his story, and history. Jack had been a miner, laid off in 1980, when ARCO Atlantic Richfield, which had bought Anaconda and its mines only three years earlier, closed them all down because of lower metal prices.
“Three hundred miners lost the last 3500 dollars they had.” He said. “Investing in the new jobs they were promised. Don’t get me started.” But it was too late for that.
The mines of Butte had attracted workers from around the globe- immigrants from Cornwall, Ireland, Wales, Lebanon, Canada, Finland, Austria, Serbia, Italy, China, Syria, Croatia, Montenegro, Mexico, and all areas of the US. They brought their food into the ground, Cornish pasties, Slavic povitica, Scandinavian lefse, boneless pork chop sandwiches, huckleberry pie, and their politics back out. Butte became the ‘Gibraltar of Unionism.’ By 1886 there were 34 separate unions, representing six thousand workers. Violent strikes were inevitable. In 1892, the one in Coeur d'Alene prompted the miners of Butte to mortgage their buildings in order to send disorder support. The Western Federation of Miners was established in Butte the following year, and the Butte Miner’s Union became Local Number One of the new WFM. In 1903 the Socialist Party of America won its first victory west of the Mississippi when Anaconda elected a socialist mayor, treasurer, police judge, and three councilmen. After 1905, Butte became a hotbed for the IWW ‘Wobblies,’ the Industrial Workers of the World. None of this mattered to the Anaconda Company, who lynched an IWW board officer in 1917, and ordered company mine guards to shoot 17 strikers in the back as they tried to flee, in the Anaconda Road Massacre of 1920.
Organized Labor hadn’t occupied all the moral high ground. Their unions boycotted Chinese businesses in Chinatown, and the Chinese Exclusion Act stopped further immigration in 1882. Solidarity was an incompletely uniform and inegalitarian commodity.
But vice was equitable, and all-inclusive. In its heyday, Butte was one of the largest and most notorious wide-open copper boomtowns in the American West, where anything was obtainable. In 1893, Butte boasted 16 gambling dens and 212 taverns, including the M&M, and is still one of the few cities in the US where possession and consumption of open containers of alcoholic beverages is allowed on the street. When the miners emerged from below the city on a subzero day, their bodies emitted a puff of smoke, like they were appearing on a magician’s stage. The ladies are very fond of this smoky city. There is just enough arsenic there to let them have beautiful complexions.
Its famous red-light district, the ‘Line,’ or the ‘Copper Block,’ was centred on Mercury Street, where elegant bordellos included the famous Dumas Brothel, near what is now Butte High School, Home of the Bulldogs. Behind the brothel was the equally notorious Venus Alley, where 6000 prostitutes plied their trade in small cubicles called ‘cribs,’ a mattress and washbasin in a single small room. When Carrie Nation came to town, one of its working ladies kicked her to the ground. A hermaphrodite named Liz the Lady charged for a peek below, but everyone could look up at the 90-foot Blessed Virgin Mary statue of Our Lady of the Rockies, built and lit by floodlights, dedicated to women and mothers everywhere, on top of the Continental Divide, overlooking the town. The brothels only closed in 1982.
I asked Jack if he thought his years of mining had left him anything durable.
“Silicosis.” He said. “And hate.”
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