The Immigrant City: Who Dug Butte's Copper

At its peak, often dated to around the First World War, Butte is said to have held as many as ninety thousand to one hundred thousand people, though surviving census counts are lower and the true wartime population is not firmly documented. That made it one of the largest cities between Chicago and San Francisco. It was also, by almost any measure, the most multinational city in the American West.

The Irish got there first and in the largest numbers, primarily from County Cork and County Galway, following the same networks that had brought their cousins to the mines of Pennsylvania and the dockyards of Boston. They called their neighborhood Dublin Gulch and during the Irish War of Independence in the early nineteen twenties they ran one of the most active Irish Republican Army support chapters in North America, raising money and organizing from the Montana mountains. The Cornish miners came next, veteran hard-rock men from the southwest of England known as Cousin Jacks, carrying expertise with drills and dynamite that was worth more than their wages. Slavic and Serbian workers came for the smelter work. Finns, many of them already union men from Scandinavian labor traditions, became central to the Industrial Workers of the World organizing. Italian immigrants built their own parishes and mutual aid societies in the neighborhoods above the mines.

And the Chinese community maintained a functioning Chinatown in Butte through the early decades of the twentieth century despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two, which barred further immigration and blocked naturalization. They ran laundries, restaurants, and businesses serving the mining population while living under constant legal vulnerability and periodic violence. The Butte Chinatown was gradually dismantled in the nineteen twenties. Most of those people have no marker anywhere in the city.

The Speculator Mine fire of June eighth, nineteen seventeen, killed one hundred sixty-eight men. The casualty rolls read like a passenger manifest: Irish names, Cornish names, Slavic names, Finnish names. The copper did not care where you were from.