Copper and the War of the Copper Kings

The story of copper in Montana is not simply an economic story. For roughly forty years, from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties, the question of who controlled Montana's copper shaped the politics, the press, the courts, and the daily lives of virtually everyone in the state. One company, Anaconda Copper, ended up winning, and what winning looked like was a level of corporate control over a state government that remains a textbook case in American political history.

The copper deposits around Butte were among the richest ever found in the United States. The timing was perfect for them: the electrification of American cities in the eighteen eighties created an insatiable demand for copper wire. The men who controlled the Butte hill during the years when that demand was building became some of the wealthiest people in the country.

Marcus Daly, William Clark, and Augustus Heinze were the three principals of what Montanans came to call the War of the Copper Kings. Daly built Anaconda. Clark wanted the Senate seat and the political power that Daly refused him. Heinze used the state courts, which he effectively controlled through bribery, to tie up Anaconda's operations with competing claims for years. The fights between them were conducted through newspapers each man owned, through judges each man paid, through elections each man financed.

Clark eventually bought his Senate seat outright, and when a Senate investigation committee exposed the bribery, he resigned before a formal vote could remove him. He was later re-elected by a newly seated Montana legislature in nineteen oh one and served a full term without further challenge. He died worth roughly three hundred million dollars, an enormous fortune even by the standards of the Gilded Age.

Heinze sold out to Anaconda in nineteen oh six for about twelve million dollars and left Montana. Anaconda then controlled the state's major newspapers, its utilities, its political infrastructure, and much of its land for the next half century.