Butte and Anaconda: The Copper That Wired America

In the late eighteen hundreds, the ground beneath Butte, Montana held more copper than almost anywhere on Earth, and copper was exactly what an electrifying nation needed. Marcus Daly bought a failing silver mine in eighteen eighty-one and struck a copper lode so vast it made him one of America's richest men. He built a smelter city twenty-six miles west and called it Anaconda.

At its peak, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company controlled mines, smelters, railroads, and newspapers across the state. Butte's underground workings, called the Richest Hill on Earth, eventually became an open pit about a mile long. Together, the two cities produced copper wire that lit homes and ran motors across the continent.

Today the site is a Superfund cleanup area and a National Historic Landmark, its poisoned beauty preserved as evidence of the industrial age.