The Dirtiest Election in Montana History

Montana has had its share of corrupt elections, but the capital vote of eighteen ninety-four stands apart. Two copper kings, personally loathing each other, turned a routine question about where to put the state capital into the most expensive municipal election the American West had ever seen, and possibly the most explicitly purchased.

Marcus Daly was an Irish immigrant who had built the Anaconda Copper Mining Company into an industrial empire. His smelter town of Anaconda, thirty miles west of Helena, was his creation, his company town, and he wanted it crowned as the state capital. William Andrews Clark was another copper magnate, a rival and Daly's near-equal in wealth, who was aligned with Helena. The two men had been destroying each other in politics and business for years. This vote was personal.

Daly spent an estimated two and a half million dollars campaigning for Anaconda. Clark and Helena's business establishment spent comparable sums defending their city. Both sides bought newspaper coverage, sponsored rallies, and distributed cash to voters. The saloons on both sides of the Anaconda-Helena road reportedly ran free for weeks.

Helena won, thirty thousand to twenty-seven thousand, in November of eighteen ninety-four. Contemporary observers credited the margin not to Helena's superior arguments but to its superior bankroll. The Montana Standard later estimated that the total spending on both sides exceeded four million dollars, in an era when a working miner earned three dollars a day.

Daly never forgave it. He continued funding anti-Clark candidates and newspapers until his death in nineteen hundred. Clark eventually bought a United States Senate seat through bribery so brazen that the Senate itself refused to seat him on the first attempt. The two men defined Montana's Gilded Age politics: vast private fortunes deployed as weapons in personal vendettas, with elections as the battlefield.