In its heyday in the years before the First World War, Butte was the largest producer of copper in the world and had more than 80,000 residents. The Rockefeller-led Anaconda Copper Company was the fourth largest corporation in the world. There were scores of bars and churches, many large mansions, and a notorious red-light district (it was still in existence in the 1980s). The mountains were honeycombed with underground mines (later open pit mining replaced these). Both Butte and the nearby copper smelter town of Anaconda were union strongholds. On August 1, 1917, IWW and Western Federation of Miners organizer Frank Little was dragged from his hotel room in Butte and hung to death from a railroad trestle. Little may have been murdered because of his union activity (he also participated in the IWW’s great free speech demonstrations, including one in Missoula) or because of his open and radical opposition to U.S. entry into the First World War. His headstone marker says, “slain by capitalist interests for organizing and inspiring his fellow man.” I wish there were more Frank Littles in the labor movement today.
Copper mining brought monumental environmental damage. “For more than a century, the Anaconda Copper Mining company mined ore from Butte and smelted it in nearby Anaconda. During this time, the Anaconda smelter released up to 40 tons per day of arsenic, 1,700 tons per day of sulfur, and great quantities of lead and other heavy metals into the air. In Butte, mine tailings were dumped directly into Silver Bow Creek, creating a 150-mile plume of pollution extending down the valley to Milltown Dam on the Clark Fork River just upstream of Missoula. Air and water borne pollution poisoned livestock and agricultural soils throughout the Deer Lodge Valley.”(Wikipedia) When the underground mines were closed, the owners stopped pumping water from the mines. Water then began to accumulate in a huge crater at the base of the hill. Today the water is more than 1,000 feet deep, and tourists pay $2 to see the enormous toxic lake. In the 1950s the Berkeley Pit was excavated, eventually swallowing entire neighborhoods and the famous Columbia Gardens (botanical gardens, amusement rides, and dance pavilion), donated to Butte by original copper king William A. Clark.
Butte now contains more historically designated buildings than almost any other place in the nation. These are being bought and restored, usually by outside entrepreneurs who open businesses such as coffee shops and restaurants catering to the tourist trade. The idea is that Butte’s rich industrial history will translate into future prosperity. Right now there are tours of the underground mines led by a man pretending to be Frank Little! Frankly, I can’t see the worth of such schemes. The truth of Butte’s history is unlikely to be told to tourists. And the labor movement is pretty much a dead letter in Butte and many other places. Nothing in this restoration project will help bring about a better society. Visitors will come, see the buildings, tour the mines, check out the poisonous lake, stay at a bed and breakfast, have dinner, and leave. The radical miners who once gave hope to workers in the west and in the nation will still be dead and forgotten; the environment will still be destroyed; and nothing will have been done to address the problems discussed in my book. Better to bulldoze the town, fix the land as best we can, and erect a monument to the workers. The singer Donovan said, “History is ages past, unenlightened shadows cast.” Maybe he was talking about the ersatz history foisted upon us by those who would save buildings and bury the labor of all those who made these buildings possible. The irony is that the profits sucked form the workers live on, in the mansions of Newport and the apartments of Manhattan, in the art works collected by Clark and now on the walls of museums workers can’t afford to attend, and in the control of capital worldwide.
Michael Yates