Butte: The Richest Hill on Earth

The hill beneath what is now Butte, Montana, may be the most extracted piece of ground in American history. At its peak in the early nineteen hundreds, Butte was the largest city in the Rocky Mountains, a roaring, polyglot city that boosters claimed held close to one hundred thousand people, though the official census counted far fewer, with immigrants from Ireland, Finland, China, Serbia, and Cornwall, all drawn by the extraordinary wealth locked inside a single mountain.

Gold and silver brought the first prospectors in the eighteen sixties, but it was copper that made Butte into a colossus. The electrical revolution of the eighteen eighties created an almost unlimited appetite for copper wire, and Butte sat atop more of it than anywhere else known on earth. By the time production peaked, between eighteen eighty-seven and nineteen twenty, Butte was supplying roughly a third of the copper consumed across the United States.

The city became known as the Gibraltar of Unionism. The first miners' union was organized on June thirteenth, eighteen seventy-eight, and ultimately became Local One of the Western Federation of Miners, the most powerful labor organization in the American West. Workers fought for and won a daily minimum wage of three dollars and fifty cents at a time when most western workers had no floor at all.

But the power of organized labor was never secure. Copper King William Clark and the Anaconda Company fought union influence through every means available. On the night of August first, nineteen seventeen, six masked men broke into the Butte boarding house of Frank Little, a mixed-race Cherokee and white organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. They beat him, dragged him behind a car through the streets, and hanged him from a railroad trestle on the edge of town. A note pinned to his chest read: first and last warning. No one was ever arrested.

The open pit Berkeley Pit, begun in nineteen fifty-five, eventually swallowed entire neighborhoods. When the pumps shut off in nineteen eighty-two, toxic groundwater began to fill the pit. Today it is one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States, the terminus of a century of extraction and the price Butte paid for being the richest hill on earth.